Testing Beckers Efficient Marriage Market Hypothesis And Its Implications For Spouse Selection And Marital Transfers In India

This paper constructs an empirical model of spouse selection based on Becker’s efficient marriage market hypothesis to examine how equilibrium sorting takes place in marriage markets in India. It finds that education of the groom and age of the bride has the largest effect on matching behavior in India. More importantly, it finds that marital transfers from brides and their families to grooms and their families increase the likelihood of women marrying men of similar type

Making Course Content Conducive To A Marriage Between Theory And Practice: One Instructors Experience

This essay describes the changes made in the structure of a course on gender and economics that have the potential for improving undergraduate economics education by providing opportunities for students to “be economists” in their communities. Specifically, it describes the value of incorporating exercises that send students into the field to observe and gather data that they can bring back into the classroom to analyze and integrate into their own understanding of the issues

Marital Matching Among Immigrants: A Multidimensional Approach

This paper utilizes Becker’s theory of efficient marriage markets to investigate the patterns of marital matching in marriages between two immigrants and between an immigrant and a U.S. native-born. It employs the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series of the 2000 Census and finds support for positive assortative mating on age and education and negative assortment along income and/or hours worked. The results from estimated match matrices employing multiple individual traits reveal that while native-born men are more likely to marry immigrant women with similar traits, native-born women are least likely to marry immigrant men with similar traits when compared to the immigrant-immigrant matches.&nbsp

Women, Schooling, and Marriage in Rural Philippines

Using data from the Bicol region of the Phillipines, we examine why women are more educated than men in a rural, agricultural economy in which women are significantly less likely than men to participate in the labor market. We hypothesize that educational homogamy in the marriage market and cross-productivity effects in the household allow Filipino women to reap substantial benefits from schooling regardless of whether they enter the labor market. Our estimates reveal that the return to schooling for women is approximately 20 percent in both labor and marriage markets. In comparison, men experience a 12 percent return to schooling in the labor market. By using birth order, sibship size, percent of male siblings, and parental education as instruments, we correct for a significant downward bias that is caused by the endogeneity of schooling attainment

Gender Differences in Political Engagement Among the Youth

The issue of gender differences in voting behavior and policy attitudes has been a recurrent theme in social science literature and political commentary in the United States. In presidential and many congressional elections, for instance, women have been observed to disproportionately support Democratic candidates, compared to men. The size of this gender gap has often been bigger than the margin of victory for Democratic candidates in congressional as well as in the 1992 and 1996 presidential races. As a result, appeals designed to attract female voters have become widespread (Manza and Brooks, 1998)

Education and the Economy: The Challenge for West Michigan

Recent reports in the popular media raise concerns about a supposed “boy crisis” in the United States with regard to educational attainment. These reports cite evidence that females in the United States have caught up and surpassed males in most measures of schooling. Concern over the gender gap in schooling is misplaced, however, as racial differences in educational attainment are much more severe. This paper presents evidence on educational attainment by race and gender, nationally, within the state, and locally