The Impact of China’s Unbalanced Sex Ratio on Pre-Marital Education

Since implementing the one-child policy in the early 1980s, China has successfully controlled its population growth rate. However, this policy brought together some side effects, one of which is the unbalanced sex ratio. By the year 2000, China had 40.9 million more men than women. The large gender gap has affected both the labor market and the marriage market. We will present a model in which the labor market and the marriage market interact to determine pre-marital education, and in which the numbers of men and women are assumed to be equal. Moreover, we present the mathematical background underlying the economics model. We prove that in a matching market such as the marriage market, there always exists a stable assignment between the two groups of participants. We will adjust the model by relaxing the equal number assumption to predict the impact of China’s unbalanced sex ratio on people’s investments in pre-marital education. With more men than women, men will reduce their investments in pre-marital education while women will increase their investments in pre-marital education.