Personality Traits and the Marriage Market

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to quantify mutual attractiveness in matching markets using indices that aggregate various attributes, applied to Dutch household data to analyze marriage sorting.

Contribution

It introduces a novel index-based approach to measure mutual attractiveness and approximates matching surplus with a k-dimensional model.

Findings

Indices effectively summarize attributes relevant for matching

Application to Dutch data reveals key traits influencing marriage sorting

Method provides a new tool for analyzing matching markets

Abstract

Which and how many attributes are relevant for the sorting of agents in a matching market? This paper addresses these questions by constructing indices of mutual attractiveness that aggregate information about agents' attributes. The first k indices for agents on each side of the market provide the best approximation of the matching surplus by a k-dimensional model. The methodology is applied on a unique Dutch households survey containing information about education, height, BMI, health, attitude toward risk and personality traits of spouses.