The Human Capital–Reproductive Capital Trade-Off in Marriage Market Matching
研究发现20世纪女性人力资本与配偶收入呈非单调关系：研究生学历女性嫁的丈夫比本科学历女性更穷，这源于人力资本与生育能力负相关，模型用美国数据模拟了向更门当户对匹配的转变。
Throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between women’s human capital and men’s income was nonmonotonic: while college-educated women married richer spouses than high school–educated women, graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women. This can be rationalized by a bidimensional matching framework where women’s human capital is negatively correlated with another valuable trait: fertility, or reproductive capital. Such a model predicts nonmonotonicity in income matching with a sufficiently high income distribution of men. A simulation of the model using US Census fertility and income data shows that it can also predict the recent transition to more assortative matching as desired family sizes have fallen.