Fatter Attraction: Anthropometric and Socioeconomic Matching on the Marriage Market

Pierre Chiappori, Sonia Oreffice and Climent Quintana-Domeque

No 2011-012, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: We construct a matching model on the marriage market along more than one characteristic, where individuals have preferences over physical attractiveness and socioeconomic characteristics that can be summarized by a one-dimensional index combining these various attributes. We show that under a (testable) separability assumption, the indices are ordinally identified. We estimate the model using data from the PSID. Our separability tests do not reject. We find that among men, a 10% increase in BMI can be compensated by a higher wage of around 3%. Similarly, for women, an additional year of education may compensate up to three BMI units.

Keywords: BMI; marriage market; wages; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-04
Note: FI
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Chiapp ... eque_2010_fatter.pdf First version, April 21, 2010 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Fatter Attraction: Anthropometric and Socioeconomic Matching on the Marriage Market (2012)
Working Paper: Fatter attraction: anthropometric and socieconomic matching on the marriage market (2010)
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