When I interviewed Naszodi last week, she made a joke, with Valentine’s Day approaching, about “Cupid’s invisible hand.” She assured me that she does not specialize in the economics of romance. She said she studies mating behavior because it sheds light on inequality, one of her research topics. She also works on exchange rates, monetary policy and bank regulation.
The tricky part of figuring out what Cupid’s invisible hand is doing is that there are lots of driving forces. Opportunity matters as much as preference. For example, women used to be less educated than men, in general. As women became more educated, it became more likely that educated men would marry educated women, just by chance, even if there wasn’t a change in preference.
It’s easy enough for scholars to observe what people are doing; what’s hard is establishing the counterfactuals — how things might have gone differently. For example, what would marriage patterns look like if opportunities for marrying someone similar had not changed over the past 10 years? Naszodi and Mendonca came up with a way of establishing those counterfactuals, based on work by Haoming Liu and Jingfeng Lu of the National University of Singapore that was published in Economics Letters in 2006.
Using that method, Naszodi and Mendonca concluded that late baby boomers had a weaker preference for a spouse of the same education than early baby boomers had. That signaled a decrease in inequality. When late Gen Xers reached the marriage market, the preference for a spouse of the same education level had strengthened, a mark of increasing inequality, they concluded. (They looked at people when they were 30 to 34 and studied only heterosexual relationships.)
If you don’t have a date for Valentine’s Day, assortative mating could be one of your problems. Poor, uneducated men are being excluded from the marriage market because there are fewer women who want to marry them. Women have become better educated and prosperous, on average, and they would rather marry someone who is their socioeconomic equal. However, there’s a shortage of unmarried men with high socioeconomic status. So, many of the women with high aspirations remain single.
Naszodi and Mendonca’s latest finding, in a forthcoming paper, is that millennials are somewhat less picky about the education level of their mates than Gen Xers. “It gives rise to optimism,” Naszodi wrote me in an email. “Millennials have better chances to find a suitable partner than Gen Xers used to have.”