Authors: Marina Adshade
One additional consideration is that people who are married, those who are no longer searching for a mate, tend to move out of cities in search of lower property values and places that are more suitable to raise children. This means that cities not only have more single people, but also that single people make up a greater share of the population in the city than they do in rural areas.
So your office friends, from our example, are more likely to have at least one single friend in the city than they are in rural areas where a greater share of the population is married.
Having said that cities are better places to find romance, in general, there is one group of people that traditionally have struggled to find love in an urban market: educated women.
According to Roderick Duncan, the reason there are so many single educated women on urban marriage markets is just a matter of numbers and preference; educated women greatly outnumber educated men because more women than men go to college and because educated women prefer to marry men who are better educated than themselves while educated men do not.
We already know from
chapter 1
that women have been attending, and completing, college at much higher rates than men since the late 1980s. We also know that women search for men who will allow them to exercise their comparative advantage and that historically, because of the gender wage gap, men have held a comparative advantage in waged employment and women have held a comparative advantage in home production.
Over time this comparative advantage of men in waged employment has developed into a social norm leading women to expect to find men with higher incomes than themselves. Now that educated men have become scarce relative to educated women, however, at least some of the women who marry will not have that expectation met. Over time expectations are changing, but social norms evolve slowly, leaving many women in the meantime struggling to find a marriage partner they deem suitable.
In the past, when the majority of people were not educated above the high school level, most women married men who were less educated than themselves. This is principally because women have always been more likely to finish high school than have men. My own parents are a good example of this; my U.S.-educated mother has a high school diploma while my South African-born father never had an opportunity to finish high school, having been sent into military training at the age of 14. At the time that they married, there was nothing unusual about a high school-educated woman marrying a man who had left school earlier to join the workforce.
According to Roderick Duncan's paper, in 1940, 45 percent of women who had a high school diploma were married to men who did not complete high school while only 20 percent were married to men who had spent at least some time in college. By 1960, this had changed somewhat. At that time, 33 percent of women with a high school diploma were married to men who had not completed high school, compared with 23 percent who were married to men who had spent at least some time in college. By 1990, more women with a high school diploma were marrying men with at least some college than were marrying men who were educated at below the high school level.
This evidence may run contrary to what I have just said about comparative advantage, but in the earlier decades even men who didn't finish high school still earned more than their high school-educated wivesâso women married up in terms of income at the same time that they married down in terms of education.
This information brings to light the following observation: the women who have valued finding a husband who is better educated than themselves have been, for a long time, principally college-educated women. As the wage paid to less-educated workers has fallen in the last thirty years and women's wages have increased relative to men's, however, women with less education have also begun to seek men with more education than themselves. This is because men with less than a high school education no longer earn more than their high school-educated wives.
More women seeking more-educated husbands has meant that educated men have becoming relatively scarce compared with educated women, not only because fewer men go to college, but also because changes in wages are encouraging less-educated and more-educated women to pursue the same men.
Men do not appear to share women's preference for a better-educated spouse, and because social norms dictate that women should be homemakers and men providers, traditionally they are happy to find a spouse who is less educated than themselves, allowing them to specialize in market labor. The evidence on dating sites we looked at in
chapter 3
backs up this assertion; men looking for love online seem to care very little about a potential mate's income.
In addition to providing a superior marriage market, educated singles tend to move into cities because the wages paid to well-educated workers are higher in cities than they are in rural areas. While this is true for both men and women, educated female workers have an additional incentive to be in cities; they are significantly more likely to find an educated husband there. Less-educated women also have an incentive to move into cities for the same reasonâthey may not benefit from higher wages in the city, but they are much more likely to find themselves a well-educated husband than they would had they stayed in the country.
Lena Edlund tests this hypothesis using Swedish data and finds that the higher the income earned by men (ages 25 to 44) in a particular city, the more women there are living in that city relative to the number of men. This is an interesting result since we expect that high male wages
would encourage more men to move into a city. This might still be the case, but it appears that high male wages also encourage women to move into the city, in fact more women than men. This has to be true for the ratio of men to women to fall when men's incomes are high.
This leads to me to wonder if women take their marriage market prospects into consideration when they decide how much time to spend in school. Perfect foresight should tell women that the longer they stay in school, the more competition they will have when they search for a husband in the future (if women wait until they finish school before marrying, which many do). Because there are fewer potential partners for women at every education level, and many of those men are perfectly happy to marry women who are less educated than themselves, and because they are older when they start to look for a husband, educated women face competition from women who are both less educated and younger.
New research by Canadian economists Sylvain Dessy and Habiba Djebbari tackles this issue and finds that one of the explanations for why men outnumber women in high-power jobs is that women decide to enter the marriage market when they are younger rather than risk being unsuccessful in that market later in life.
It appears from the evidence that some women, at least, choose to invest less in their education in a competitive marriage market because time in school, if it delays marriage, consumes several years of their fertility. If educated men prefer younger but less-educated women over older but better-educated women, then there is an incentive for women to leave school and try to find a well-educated husband while they are young.
This is especially true for women who feel that even with an education their comparative advantage is in caring for children and a home rather than working in the labor force.
Either way, the current situation that leaves educated women with fewer marriage prospects doesn't sound like equilibrium to meâa market is always out of equilibrium whenever supply exceeds demand. I can think of three things that might happen to bring this particular market back into equilibrium.
EVEN IN HOLLYWOOD MARRIAGES, EDUCATION MATTERS
Using information about the current marital status of the top four hundred movie actors, economist Gustaf Bruze finds that male and female stars are likely to be married to another person who has an education level similar to theirs.
Of the men on the list of the top four hundred movie actors, 52 percent were married at the time the data were collected in 2008. Far fewer of the women were married, only 38 percent, despite the fact that women in the top four hundred actors had an average age of 41. Only about half of married movie stars are with people who are well-known, either because they are also actors or because they are models, singers, musicians, etc. For married stars, the average age at which they entered their current marriage was 38 for men and 35 for women. The vast majority of top actors have either never been married (27 percent) or have been married only once (45 percent), making them slightly less likely than the average U.S. citizen to have been married once and slightly more likely never to have been married at all. While they are slightly more likely than the average person to have been married twice (20 percent) or three times (8 percent), the differences are small enough to be insignificant.
Despite our preconception that marriages in Hollywood are fleeting and frequent, the top stars seem to behave pretty similarly to the rest of us. The interesting thing about movie stars is that, unlike the rest of us, their income is not linked to their level of education but rather to a variety of other skills that are not learned in a classroom. In the Hollywood
marriage market, we shouldn
'
t observe couples matching over education but rather other characteristics that increase income
â
like physical appearance.
The odd thing is that even in Hollywood marriages, the education level of a potential spouse appears to matter; a movie star is almost as likely to be married to someone with the same education level as himself/herself as is anyone from the general public. This is interesting because it suggests that finding someone with a similar education level to yours brings something else to marriage besides an indicator of income. Presumably people who are similarly educated have more in common with each other and, even for celebrities, that commonality is important.
The first is that men will increase their investment in education in the hope of improving their position on the marriage market. It is not likely that teenage boys take their marriage prospects into consideration when making education decisions, but we could reasonably expect that they take into consideration their prospects for getting laid when deciding whether or not to continue in school. For that reason alone, given the evidence we discussed in
chapter 2
, you would think that there would be more men in college.
The second is that educated women in cities will look in a different market for a mateâthe rural marriage market. For the same reason educated women outnumber men in the city, less-educated men must outnumber women in rural areasâbecause women are moving to the cities. In the last decade, technology has advanced in such a way that educated workers have more flexibility about where they spend their workday. If women are prepared to marry men with less educationâand in fact, according to the Pew Research Center the share of women currently married to men with less education (28 percent) is greater than the share who is married to men with more education (19 percent)âthen, for some women, finding a city job that allows them to spend their workdays in rural areas might be the answer.
MARRIAGE REINFORCES AN ECONOMIC CLASS SYSTEM
At the end of the marriage market, couples seem to be tidily sorted over characteristics such as income, education, religion, height, beauty, and even body weight. A new paper by Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Alexandra Killewald finds an additional element that appears to be important in marital sorting: parental wealth.
If we randomly matched a man whose parents
'
wealth was less than $1,000 with any woman, there would be only a 16 percent chance that he would end up married to a woman whose parents also had less than $1,000 in wealth. In reality, 35 percent of men with low-wealth parents have wives whose parents
'
wealth is equally low.
On the other hand, if we randomly matched a man whose parents
'
wealth was greater than $100,000 with any woman, there would be only a 39 percent chance that he would end up married to a woman whose parents also had more than $100,000 in wealth. Instead, 60 percent of men are married to women whose parents have wealth in the top bracket, and only 7 percent are married to women whose parental wealth is less than $1,000.
It isn
'
t surprising that parental wealth plays a role in marriage market outcomes, for a variety of reasons. It could just be that people meet their future spouses in their parents
'
social circles, or that they have more common interests with those who have similar wealth backgrounds.
What is interesting, though, is that marital sorting over wealth means that the gains from marriage are not equal among people of different socioeconomic groups; wealthy people have far more to gain from marriage than do those
with no wealth. This fact might explain why people with higher incomes are more likely to marry than people with low incomes, given that income (and education level) is correlated with parental wealth.
It also suggests that because of the way people choose their spouses, the divide in wealth levels between the rich and the poor will only expand over time. The children of the wealthy will not only inherit their parent
'
s wealth but also that of their spouse
'
s parents. The children of the poor will inherit their parent
'
s debts and the debts of their spouse
'
s parents. Marital sorting over parental wealth suggests that, over time, wealth will become concentrated in the hands of an increasingly smaller proportion of households.
The final possibility is that, of course, educated women will (and do) choose to remain single rather than marry a man with less education and/or income. In doing so, they won't have the benefits of marriage that we discussed earlier, but the market can provide much of what they need (sperm banks, for example) and, for many, their income is sufficiently high that they can afford to purchase at least some of the goods and services that marriage might have provided. For many women, that is the perfect arrangement.