Job Displacement, Remarriage, and Marital Sorting

Hanno Foerster, Tim Obermeier and Bastian Schulz

No 1082, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: We investigate how job displacement affects whom men marry and study implications for marriage market matching theory. Leveraging quasi-experimental variation from Danish establishment closures, we show that job displacement leads men to break up if matched with low-earning women and to re-match with higher earning women. We use a general search and matching model of the marriage market to derive several implications of our empirical findings: (i) husbands’ and wives’ incomes are substitutes rather than complements in the marriage market; (ii) our findings are hard to reconcile with one-dimensional matching, but are consistent with multidimensional matching; (iii) a substantial part of the cross-sectional correlation between spouses’ incomes arises spuriously from sorting on unobserved characteristics. We highlight the relevance of our results by simulating how the effect of rising individual-level inequality on between-household inequality is shaped by marital sorting.

Keywords: Marriage Market; Sorting; Search and Matching; Multidimensional Heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D1 D83 J12 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/EC-P/wp1082.pdf main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Job displacement, remarriage and marital sorting (2024)
Working Paper: Job Displacement, Remarriage, and Marital Sorting (2024)
Working Paper: Job Displacement, Remarriage, and Marital Sorting (2024)
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:boc:bocoec:1082

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill MA 02467 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F Baum ().