The Effects of Educational Assortative Matching on Job and Marital Satisfaction

This paper studies how the decision to attend university may affect job and marital satisfaction. We propose a theoretical model with educational assortative matching, where individuals differ in their ability, and educated spouses are preferred in the marriage market. Thus, individuals decide whether to attend university both for obtaining higher job satisfaction and for meeting educated partners. Job satisfaction is modelled to take into account the working conditions of the average educated individual as the reference type, toward which educated individuals compare themselves (Luttmer 2005, Clark and Oswald, 1996). We show that, as the probability of educational assortative matching increases, the average ability of educated individuals falls, since more low ability students are willing to attend university for marital reasons. This ultimately raises job satisfaction because, by lowering average ability, it also lowers the working conditions of the reference type. Expected marital satisfaction also increases, as more educated individuals enter the marriage market. We test the model using the dataset Marital Instability Over the Life Course for years 1980-2000, by estimating the effects of an increase in educational assortative matching on job and marital satisfaction. The empirical results confirm the theoretical findings.