Personality Traits and the Marriage Market
Abstract
Which and how many attributes are relevant for the sorting of agents in a matching market? This paper adresses these questions by constructing indices of mutual attractiveness that aggregate information about agents' attributes. The rst k indices for agents on each side of the market provide the best approximation of the matching surplus by a k-dimensional model. The methodology is applied on a unique Dutch households survey containing information about education, height, BMI, health, attitude towards risk and personality traits of spouses. Three important empirical conclusions are drawn. First, sorting in the marriage market is not unidimensional: individuals face important trade-os between the attributes of their spouses which are not amenable to a singledimensional index. Second, although education explains a quarter of a couple's observable surplus, personality traits explain another 20%. Third, dierent personality traits matter dierently for men and for women.Download Info
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Paper provided by Maastricht School of Management in its series Working Papers with number 2012/41.Length: 43 pages
Date of creation: Oct 2012
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:msm:wpaper:2012/41
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Keywords: Multidimensional sorting; Saliency Analysis; marriage market; personality traits; continuous logit;Other versions of this item:
- Dupuy, Arnaud & Galichon, Alfred, 2012. "Personality Traits and the Marriage Market," IZA Discussion Papers 6943, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
- D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution
- J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure
- J23 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Demand
- J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2012-10-27 (All new papers)
- NEP-DEM-2012-10-27 (Demographic Economics)
- NEP-NEU-2012-10-27 (Neuroeconomics)
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Dupuy, Arnaud & Galichon, Alfred, 2012.
"Canonical Correlation and Assortative Matching: A Remark,"
IZA Discussion Papers
6942, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
- Arnaud Dupuy & Alfred Galichon, 2012. "Canonical Correlation and Assortative Matching: a remark," Working Papers 2012/40, Maastricht School of Management.
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