Education and Marriage: Theory and Evidence

This paper is concerned with the relation between marriage and higher education. We build up a model with educational assortative matching where individuals decide whether to acquire higher education both for obtaining educational surplus and for increasing the probability to be matched with an educated partner. Education can be either asymmetric or symmetric between genders. The educational choices between future partners are simultaneously determined as a Nash equilibrium. The results for asymmetric education suggest that, as assortative matching increases, the proportion of educated men increases, and their educational surplus falls. On the other side, the proportion of educated women diminishes and their educational surplus increases. In the case with symmetric education, the educational bene…t falls as assortative matching increases, regardless the gender. We test our model using the British Household Panel Survey. Our results are consistent with the theoretical assumption of educational assortative matching. Even if the proportion of educated men is slightly higher than the proportion of educated women, the educational surplus is lower as the educational quali…cation increases for both men and women, as suggested by the symmetric-education hypothesis. JEL Numbers: C78, I21, J12