On the Emergence of Toyboys: Equilibrium Matching with Ageing and Uncertain Careers

Melvyn Coles and Marco Francesconi

No 2612, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Toyboy marriages (where the female partner is at least 5 years older than her male partner) have grown threefold since the 1970s in the United States and Britain. This paper examines this phenomenon using an equilibrium search framework in which becoming successful in the labour market takes time and fitness decays with age. Our framework hinges on contract incompleteness in the marriage market and the assumption that the marginal gain to marrying someone rich is greatest for someone poor. With this structure we can explain why successful (older) types might marry fitter (younger) and less successful types. We show that toyboy marriages arise in equilibrium only when men and women have comparable labour market opportunities. U.S. and British data confirm this indicating that the probability that a woman is married to a toyboy increases by about 45 percent if, relative to her partner’s, she is more educated and in a better paid job.

Keywords: marriage; two-sided search; non-transferable utility; ex-ante heterogeneity; ageing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J16 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2007-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published - published in: International Economic Review, 2011, 52 (3), 825-853

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