Matching with a Handicap: The Case of Smoking in the Marriage Market

Pierre Chiappori, Sonia Oreffice and Climent Quintana-Domeque

No 8, CHILD Working Papers Series from Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic Economics (CHILD) - CCA

Abstract: We develop a matching model on the marriage market, where individuals have preferences over the smoking status of potential mates, and over their socioeconomic quality. Spousal smoking is bad for non-smokers, but it is neutral for smokers, while individuals always prefer high socioeconomic quality. Furthermore, there is a gender difference in smoking prevalence, there being more smoking men than smoking women for all education levels, so that smoking women and non-smoking men are in short supply. The model generates clear cut conditions regarding matching patterns. Using CPS data and its Tobacco Use Supplements for the years 1996 to 2007 and proxing socioeconomic status by educational attainment, we find that these conditions are satisfied. There are fewer “mixed” couples where the wife smokes than vice-versa, and matching is assortative on education among couples with identical smoking habits. Among non-smoking wives those with smoking husbands have on average 0.14 fewer years of completed education than those with non-smoking husbands. Finally, and somewhat counterintuitively, we find that among smoking husbands those who marry smoking wives have on average 0.16 more years of completed education than those with non-smoking wives.

Keywords: smoking; education; matching; marriage market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 61 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.child.carloalberto.org/images/documenti/child08_2012.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Matching with a Handicap: The Case of Smoking in the Marriage Market (2011)
Working Paper: Matching with a Handicap: The Case of Smoking in the Marriage Market (2010)
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:cca:wchild:8

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CHILD Working Papers Series from Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic Economics (CHILD) - CCA Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Bert ().