Are China's "Leftover Women" Really Leftover? An Investigation of Marriage Market Penalties in Modern-day China

Loren Brandt (), Hongbin Li, Laura Turner and Jiaqi Zou

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: A recent trend in Korea and Japan sees college-graduate women marrying later and at lower rates than less-educated women. In China, "leftover women" have also become a top policy concern. This paper finds however that China's higher-educated urban women attain marital outcomes more like those in the US than in the other Asian Tiger countries, marrying later, but ultimately at comparable rates to less-educated women. For 1990-2009, we quantify marriage quality using the classic Choo-Siow (2006) estimator and find large returns to marrying later but minimal direct higher education effects. Using the Choo (2015) dynamic estimator, we project future marriage rates to remain stable among the higher educated and to decline for lower-educated women.

Keywords: China; marriage markets; fertility; leftover women; education; assortative mating (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J11 J12 J13 N35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: Unknown pages
Date: 2018-08-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/tecipa-613.pdf Main Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Are China’s “Leftover Women” really leftover? An investigation of marriage market penalties in modern-day China (2018)
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:tor:tecipa:tecipa-613

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().