The Human Capital-Reproductive Capital Trade-Off in Marriage Market Matching

Throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between women's human capital and men's income was nonmonotonic: while college-educated women married richer spouses than high school-educated women, graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women. This can be rationalized by a bidimensional matching framework where women's human capital is negatively correlated with another valuable trait: fertility, or reproductive capital. Such a model predicts nonmonotonicity in income matching with a sufficiently high income distribution of men. A simulation of the model using US Census fertility and income data shows that it can also predict the recent transition to more assortative matching as desired family sizes have fallen.