Marital Sorting on Pre-Marital Preferences for Household Behavior

TL;DR

This paper uses novel pre-marital data from a marriage platform to analyze multidimensional assortative matching, revealing significant sorting on age, fertility preferences, and other attributes before marriage.

Contribution

It introduces a new dataset capturing pre-marital preferences and verifies measurable attributes, providing insights into the timing and dimensions of marital sorting.

Findings

Assortative matching occurs along all measured dimensions.

Age and fertility preferences are the most significant sorting traits.

Fertility preferences are a distinct dimension emerging at later relationship stages.

Abstract

We examine marital sorting using novel data from a marriage-matching platform that records both a dating-to-marriage pipeline and pre-marital attributes, including preferences for children and for the division of housework and childcare. Unlike census or post-marital surveys, characteristics are collected before matching, and objectively measurable attributes are verified using official documents, providing an ideal setting to study matching and sorting free from post-marital adjustment. Using a multidimensional matching framework across twelve attributes, we find assortative matching along all dimensions. Age is the most salient trait, while preferences for children are second--exceeding education--an economically important margin invisible in standard data. A low-dimensional factor representation shows that fertility preferences constitute a distinct sorting dimension. Exploiting the platform's dating-to-marriage pipeline, we show that sorting on fertility preferences emerges at later serious-relationship stages. A theoretical analysis suggests that the magnitude of sorting along this margin is consistent with the veto model of fertility decisions.