Making Yourself Attractive: Pre-Marital Investments and the Returns to Education on the Marriage Market

While several studies examine the e¤ect of marriage market conditions on post-marital labor supply, few account for the e¤ect that these conditions may have on pre-marital investment decisions and mate selection. This paper investigates theoretically and empirically how changes in marriage market conditions a¤ect pre-marital investments. I …rst show how a change in the sex ratio –that is, the ratio of males to females –can alter incentives for investments both in the context of a unitary model of the household and in a non-unitary setting with post-match bargaining. I show that a rise in the sex ratio will lead men to increase pre-matching investments and women to decrease them if agents are su¢ ciently risk averse. I test this prediction using exogenous variation in the marriage market sex ratio generated by the preference of second generation Americans for endogamy and shocks brought about by immigration. I …nd that a worsening of marriage market conditions spurs higher pre-marital investments, measured by years of education, literacy and occupational choice. Speci…cally, a change of the sex ratio from one to two leads men to increase their educational investment by 0.5 years on average and women to decrease it by 0.05 years. In addition, the e¤ect of the sex ratio on pre-marital investments appear to, in itself, signi…cantly alter post-marital labor supply behavior suggesting that accounting for these e¤ects when using marriage market conditions as proxies for ex-post bargaining power is important. Overall, these results suggest that there are substantial returns to education on the marriage market, and that both men and women take these returns into account when making education decisions.