Working Papers
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Is Marriage A Normal Good? Evidence from NBA drafts [paper]
Media coverage: [Marginal Revolution] [MyMoneyKarma]
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Despite globally declining marriage rates in recent decades, little is known about whether improvements in male economic status increase marriage. This paper tackles lack of data on permanent income shocks for men by examining a natural experiment surrounding the NBA’s annual player drafts. I exploit two institutional features: well- defined initial salaries decreasing monotonically by draft order and high-quality draft predictions that inform player expectations. To isolate the causal effect of male earnings on marriage outcomes, I show that disparities between predicted and actual draft ranks exogenously shift player salaries. This setup provides novel income treatments that are not only large and individual-specific but also opportunely occurring early in career and adult life, before family formation takes place. Constructing a new dataset tracking players’ major family decisions, I am the first to show men are indeed more likely to marry when their earnings increase, despite modern-day normalization of cohabitation. For the 2004-2013 draft cohorts, a 10% increase in initial five-year salary raises likelihood of marriage by 8.9%. Excluding superstar draft picks yields larger and more significant results, reasonably suggesting lower income men are more responsive to income shocks.
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Are China's "Leftover Women" really leftover? An investigation of marriage market penalties in modern-day China (with Loren Brandt, Hongbin Li, and Laura Turner), submitted.
[working paper] [slides]
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A recent trend in Korea and Japan sees college-graduate women marrying later and at lower rates than less-educated women. In China, "leftover women" have also become a top policy concern. This paper finds, however, that China's higher-educated urban women attain marital outcomes more similar to those in the US than in other Asian Tiger countries: marrying later, but ultimately at rates comparable to those of less-educated women. Furthermore, for 1990-2009, we quantify marriage quality using the classic Choo-Siow (2006) estimator and find large returns to marrying later but minimal direct higher-education effects. Using the Choo (2015) dynamic estimator, we project future marriage rates to remain stable among the higher-educated and decline for lower-educated women.
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