Males’ housing wealth and their marriage market advantage

C. Y. Cyrus Chu (), Jou-Chun Lin () and Wen-Jen Tsay
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C. Y. Cyrus Chu: Academia Sinica
Jou-Chun Lin: University of California

Journal of Population Economics, 2020, vol. 33, issue 3, No 7, 1005-1023

Abstract: Abstract In theory, people who own real estate should have advantage finding a partner in the marriage market. Empirical analyses along this line, however, face three issues. First, it is difficult to identify any causality for whether housing facilitates marriage or expected marriage facilitates a housing purchase. Second, survey samples usually do not cover very wealthy people, and so the observations are top coding in the wealth dimension. Third, getting married is a dynamic life cycle decision, and rich life-history data are rarely available. This paper uses registry data from Taiwan to estimate the impact of males’ housing wealth on their first-marriage duration, taking into account all three issues mentioned above. We find that a 10% increase in real estate wealth increases probability of a man getting married in any particular year by 3.92%. Our finding suggests that housing or real estate is a status good in the marriage market.

Keywords: Marriage formation; Housing wealth; Status good; Duration model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 J12 R21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1007/s00148-019-00763-4

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