Personality Traits and the Marriage Market

Arnaud Dupuy (arnauddupuy74@gmail.com) and Alfred Galichon

No 6943, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Which and how many attributes are relevant for the sorting of agents in a matching market? This paper addresses these questions by constructing indices of mutual attractiveness that aggregate information about agents' attributes. The first k indices for agents on each side of the market provide the best approximation of the matching surplus by a k-dimensional model. The methodology is applied on a unique Dutch household survey containing information about education, height, BMI, health, attitude towards risk and personality traits of spouses. Three important empirical conclusions are drawn. First, sorting in the marriage market is not unidimensional: individuals face important trade-offs between the attributes of their spouses which are not amenable to a single-dimensional index. Second, although education explains a quarter of a couple's observable surplus, personality traits explain another 20%. Third, different personality traits matter differently for men and for women.

Keywords: continuous logit; multidimensional sorting; marriage market; saliency analysis; personality traits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 J21 J23 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Published - published in: Journal of Political Economy, 2014, 122 (6), 1271-1319.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6943.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Personality Traits and the Marriage Market (2021)
Journal Article: Personality Traits and the Marriage Market (2014)
Working Paper: Personality traits and the marriage market (2012)
Working Paper: Personality Traits and the Marriage Market (2012)
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:iza:izadps:dp6943

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
library@iza.org

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte (hinte@iza.org).