Assortative Matching at the Top of the Distribution: Evidence from the World's Most Exclusive Marriage Market
利用英国贵族婚姻数据，发现伦敦社交季的中断降低了搜索成本并减少了市场隔离，导致贵族与平民通婚增加40%，土地财富匹配减少30%，进而削弱了贵族的政治权力并影响公共政策。
Using novel data on peerage marriages in Britain, I find that low search costs and marriage-market segregation can generate sorting. Peers courted in the London Season, a matching technology introducing aristocratic bachelors to debutantes. When Queen Victoria went into mourning for her husband, the Season was interrupted (1861–1863), raising search costs and reducing market segregation. I exploit exogenous variation in women's probability to marry during the interruption from their age in 1861. The interruption increased peer–commoner intermarriage by 40 percent and reduced sorting along landed wealth by 30 percent. Eventually, this reduced peers' political power and affected public policy in late nineteenth-century England.