Beauty vs. Earnings: Gender Di¤erences in Earnings and Priorities Over Spousal Characteristics in a Matching Model

I develop a model of marriage matching where males and females care about two distinct characteristics of their spouse beauty and earnings. Each individuals beauty is exogenous, but earnings depend on human capital investments made by each individual prior to entering the marriage market. I show that even if males and females constitute ex-ante identical populations, with identical underlying preferences and equal access to human capital investment and labor market opportunities, there can still exist an equilibrium where, on average, one gender invests more in human capital than the other, and moreover, members of one gender are more likely to prioritize beauty over earnings in a spouse, while members of the other gender are more likely to prioritize a potential spouses earnings over beauty. JEL codes J12, J16, J24, and D1. Thanks to Eric Furstenburg, Dan Hamermesh, Benjamin Karney, and seminar participants at the University of British Columbia for helpful comments on earlier versions of this project. Much of this work was done while I was on a reseach leave at the RAND Corporation. 1