The effects of educational assortative matching on job and marital satisfaction

Alessandro Tampieri

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2022, vol. 98, issue C

Abstract: 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 prefer to marry an educated spouse. 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 income level of the average educated individual as the reference type, toward which educated individuals compare themselves. We show that, provided that the cost of social comparison is not too strong, the average ability of educated individuals falls with assortative matching, since more low ability students are willing to attend university for marital reasons. The lower average ability ultimately raises job satisfaction because it reduces the income level of the reference type. Expected marital satisfaction also increases, as more educated individuals enter the marriage market.

Keywords: Higher education; Job satisfaction; Marital satisfaction; Educational assortative matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I31 J12 J28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221480432200057X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The Effects of Educational Assortative Matching on Job and Marital Satisfaction (2018)
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:eee:soceco:v:98:y:2022:i:c:s221480432200057x

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2022.101883

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().