A goods characteristics model of the hedonic ageing equation: evidence from a French marriage bureau

Sam Cameron and Nicolas Vaillant ()

Brussels Economic Review, 2005, vol. 48, issue 4, 341-354

Abstract: The present paper adopts a modelling perspective derived from goods characteristics analysis [Lancaster (1971)] and the general ideas of transactions costs. This is implemented in estimated equations, which feature the age of partner sought as the dependent variable and own age and various other personal characteristics, and characteristics desired in a partner, as the right-hand side variables. The results show a very strong relationship between age and desired partner age. More interestingly, the coefficient on partner age is statistically significantly less than one. This implies a growing gap in the market as the participants grow older as they will be unable to find a suitable match unless they are able to bring a sufficiently increasing stock of other assets to compensate for their own increased age. We also find the male partner age coefficient to be significantly lower than that for females. This conforms to the findings of Cameron and Collins (1997) using a radically different data set.

Keywords: Marriage; search; age; goods characteristics; hedonic equation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/12013/1/ber-0337.pdf ber-0337 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: A Goods Characteristics Model of the Hedonic Ageing Equation: Evidence from a French Marriage Bureau (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bxr:bxrceb:y:2005:v:48:i:4:p:341-354

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... ulb.ac.be:2013/12013

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Brussels Economic Review from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().