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Browsing Tags marriage markets

Publication: What Do Parents Want? Parental Spousal Preferences in China

This paper, with Eva Raiber, Weiwei Ren, Jeanne Bovet and Charlotte Wang, is published in Economic Development and Cultural Change 71(3), 2023, https://doi.org/10.1086/717903.

Pre-publication version here.

Abstract:

In many societies, parents are involved in selecting a spouse for their child, integrating this with decisions about premarital investment such as education. Do spousal preferences of parents and children conflict? We estimate parents’ spousal preferences based on survey choices between random profiles, elicited from parents or other relatives who actively search for a spouse on behalf of their adult child in Kunming, China. We simulate marriage outcomes based on preferences for age and education and compare them with patterns in the general population, and with preferences of a survey of students. The common concern that there may be aversion to highly-educated or high-earning wives is somewhat corroborated in parents’ preferences but not in students’ preferences, nor in outcomes, where homogamy is common and wives who are more educated than husbands are as common as husbands more educated than wives. Parents prefer wives younger than their husbands, yet most couples are the same age, an outcome consistent with student preferences. Overall, divergences between parental and child preferences exist, but are neither major nor very influential in explaining observed outcomes. Fears that highly educated women face diminished marriage prospects appear less serious than often claimed.

Research on gender, networks and marriage markets

In the last few years I have undertaken a number of projects with co-authors Sylvie Borau, Jeanne Bovet, Guido Friebel, Marie Lalanne, Eva Raiber, Weiwei Ren, Peter Schwardmann and Charlotte Wang.

The published papers that have come out of this line of work are (the most recently published first):

What Do Parents Want? Parental Spousal Preferences in China, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1086/717903. Preprint available here.

“The old boy network: are the professional networks of females executives less effective than men’s for advancing their careers?”, joint with Marie Lalanne, Journal of Institutional Economics (2022), pp. 1-20.  https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137421000953.

“Gender Differences in Social Interactions”, joint with Guido Friebel, Marie Lalanne, Bernard Richter and Peter Schwardmann, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 186 (2021), 33-45, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.03.016.

“Parent-Offspring Conflict over Mate Choice: an experimental study in China”, joint with Jeanne Bovet, Eva Raiber, Weiwei Ren and Charlotte Wang, British Journal of Psychology (2018). doi:10.1111/bjop.12319.

“Honest signalling in trust interactions: smiles rated as genuine induce trust and signal higher earnings opportunities”, with Samuele Centorrino, Elodie Djemai, Astrid Hopfensitz, Manfred Milinski, Evolution and Human Behavior, 36(1), (2015), 8-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.08.001.

“Do women have longer conversations? Telephone evidence of gendered communication strategies”, joint with Guido Friebel, Journal of Economic Psychology, 2011, doi:10.1016/j.joep.2010.12.008.

Working papers and those currently under submission include (not a complete list):

“Dating Choice and Career Choice: do the dating choices of ambitious women reinforce gender stereotypes in the labor market?”, with Jeanne Bovet and Sylvie Borau, under submission.

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