Wednesday, March 4, 2015 | 2:00pm–3:30pm | Room 335, HSBC Business School Building

Abstract

There have been increasing reports in China of the difficulties of elite women to find suitable mates despite the growing scarcity of women. To help explain this, we consider the impact of women’s preference for men who have higher incomes than themselves, found in a prior online dating study, on the competition between women as a function of their own incomes. The key characteristic of this “reference dependent preference” is to escalate the competition women face as their incomes increase by decreasing the pool of men they desire while simultaneously expanding the pool of women who desire them. We first show theoretically that, as a consequence, high-income women can be made worse off when higher income men are more plentiful or richer. We then exploit variations in local sex ratios and men’s income across major cities in China to test for changes in high-income women’s search intensities, marriage rates, and household bargaining power. As predicted, only the search intensity, singles rates and share of housework of high-income women increased with the incomes and plentifulness of high-income men. Our findings with online dating, census and time use data suggest that the difficulties of elite women stem from incentives that affect women in general.