Personality Traits and the Marriage Market

Abstract

Personality Traits and the Marriage Market * Which and how many attributes are relevant for the sorting of agents in a matching market? This paper addresses these questions by constructing indices of mutual attractiveness that aggregate information about agents' attributes. The first 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 household 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-offs between the attributes of their spouses which are not amenable to a single-dimensional index. Second, although education explains a quarter of a couple's observable surplus, personality traits explain another 20%. Third, different personality traits matter differently for men and for women. JEL Classification:D3, J21, J23, J31

Matching in closed-form: equilibrium, identification, and comparative statics

“…Assumptions 1-3 are the assumptions of Dupuy and Galichon [11], extending Choo and Siow [6] to the continuous case. We impose two further restrictions, namely normal marginal distributions and quadratic surplus:…”

“…Let M (P, Q) be the set of matching assignments, i.e. distributions over (X, Y ) , such that X ∼ P , and Y ∼ Q. Theorem 1 in [11] implies that:…”

Matching in Closed-Form: Equilibrium, Identification, and Comparative Statics

“…We adopt the setting of Dupuy and Galichon [11], extending Choo and Siow [6] to the case when the characteristics of the matching populations are continuous. As it is standard in the search and matching literature, we interpret each firm as a unique job position or task.…”

“…Galichon and Salanié ([15], [16]) further introduce a parametric estimator of the surplus function. Dupuy and Galichon [11] extend the model to the continuous case and propose a decomposition of the surplus function into indices of mutual attractiveness, in order to best approximate the matching patterns by lower-dimensional models, and estimate the number of relevant dimensions on which the sorting effectively occurs. Lindenlaub [19] investigates equilibrium properties in multidimensional settings and, independently from the present work, focuses on a matching problem with quadratic surplus and Gaussian distributions of the populations, in the case when there is no unobserved heterogeneity and bivariate observed characteristics.…”

Competitive search equilibrium with multidimensional heterogeneity and two-sided ex-ante investments

“…In particular, Galichon and Salanié (2012), Dupuy andGalichon (2014), andFox (2010) use these techniques for the identi cation and estimation of frictionless matching models with transferable utility. This suggests that a similar methodology could be used to take competitive search models to the data at a high degree of disaggregation.…”