Fatter attraction: anthropometric and socioeconomic matching on the marriage market

We construct a marriage market model of matching along multiple dimensions, some of which unobservable, where individual preferences can be summarized by a one-dimensional index combining the various characteristics. We show that, under testable assumptions, these indices are ordinally identi…ed, and that the male and female trade-o¤s between their partners’characteristics are overidenti…ed. Using PSID data on married couples, we recover the marginal rates of substitutions between body mass index (BMI) and wages or education: Men may compensate 1.3 additional units of BMI with a 1%-increase in wages, while women may compensate two BMI units with one year of education. Keywords:marriage market, multidimensional matching, trade-o¤s, body mass index, wage/education. JEL Codes: D1, J1. We are grateful to two anonymous referees, and especially to the Editor (Robert Shimer) for very insightful comments. We also thank Coralio Ballester, Lola Collado, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Juan Mora, Bernard Salanié and the participants at the University of Edinburgh, Universitat d’Alacant, Clemson University, Università di Firenze, Tilburg University, Università di Padova, and Université de Cergy-Pontoise seminars, as well as the participants at the III Gender Workshop, IV Household Workshop, SOLE 2010, EEA 2010, and Royal Economic Society 2011 meetings. Ore¢ ce and Quintana-Domeque acknowledge …nancial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ECO 2008-05721/ECON). Chiappori acknowledges …nancial support from the NSF (Grant SES-1124277). A previous version of this work circulated as IVIE WP AD 2010-23. Errors are ours.