Age Matching Patterns and Search

This paper considers a marriage market with two-sided search and transferable utility in which the match payoff depends on age. It characterizes a set of payoff functions consistent with two salient marriage age patterns, (1) assortative matching by age, and (2) “differential age matching”, a formalization of the age difference at marriage between men and women. Some simple conditions on slope and curvature of the payoff function in partners’ ages are shown to achieve both, whereas supermodularity is not necessary for positive assortative matching, and in fact many common supermodular functions lead to negative sorting. (JEL C78, D83, J64) I would like to thank Ricardo Lagos and Debraj Ray for their advice and support, and Itay Fainmesser, Pietro Ortoleva, Lones Smith, and participants of the NRET seminar at NYU and of the NASMES conference 2011 for very helpful comments and suggestions. All errors are mine.