Tuesday, September 16, 2014 | 12:30pm | Room 237, HSBC Business School Building

Abstract

Becker's theory of the family predicts that couples will match on education because of the possibility of shared public goods. In support of this, prior studies have found a robust correlation in the educations of dating and married couples. However, being empirical studies, they cannot rule out couples matching on other characteristics like income, height or health, which are correlated with education, driving results. We extend this literature by randomly assigning high and low education and income levels to 410+ artificial male and female profiles on a large online dating website in China. We then counted thousands of “visits”—clicks on abbreviated profiles, which include education and income information, from search engine results. Inconsistent with prior empirical results, we found that men’s visits were unaffected by women’s education levels. Consistent with prior findings, we found that women’s visits increased with male education and income. However, we also found that male education had no effect on women’s visits if male income was below the median. Furthermore, inconsistent with educational matching, women’s apparent preference for more highly educated men was not affected by the women’s own level of education. But, their preference for higher income men was increasing with their own education. Hence, our evidence does not support the interpretation that matches with correlated educations were actually for educations’ sake for either gender. To our knowledge, this is the first field study of educational matching with random assignment.