Personality Traits and the Marriage Market

Arnaud Dupuy () and Alfred Galichon

No 2012/41, Working Papers from Maastricht School of Management

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-o s 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, di erent personality traits matter di erently for men and for women.

Keywords: Multidimensional sorting; Saliency Analysis; marriage market; personality traits; continuous logit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 J21 J23 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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http://web2.msm.nl/RePEc/msm/wpaper/MSM-WP2012-41.pdf First version, 2012 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Personality Traits and the Marriage Market (2021)
Journal Article: Personality Traits and the Marriage Market (2014)
Working Paper: Personality traits and the marriage market (2012)
Working Paper: Personality Traits and the Marriage Market (2012)
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