Partner Choice, Investment in Children, and the Marital College Premium

Pierre-André Chiappori, Bernard Salanié () and Yoram Weiss
Additional contact information
Pierre-André Chiappori: Columbia University
Bernard Salanié: Columbia University
Yoram Weiss: Tel Aviv University
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Bernard Salanié

No 2016-027, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: We construct a model of household decision-making in which agents consume a private and a public good, interpreted as children's welfare. Children's utility depends on their human capital, which is produced from parental time and human capital. We first show that as returns to human capital increase, couples at the top of the income distribution should spend more time on children. This in turn should reinforce assortative matching, in a sense we precisely define. We then embed the model into a Transferable Utility matching framework with random preferences a la Choo and Siow (2006) which we estimate on US marriage data for individuals born between 1943 and 1972. We find that the preference for assortative matching by education has significantly increased for the white population, particularly for highly educated individuals; but not for blacks. Moreover, in line with theoretical predictions, we find that the "marital college-plus premium" has increased for women but not for men.

Keywords: human capital; college premium; assortative matching; transferable utility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D13 I00 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-ltv and nep-upt
Note: FI
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Chiapp ... hoice-investment.pdf First Version, November 16, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Partner Choice, Investment in Children, and the Marital College Premium (2017)
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