| In the second chapter of this dissertation, I present data on the marital behavior of actors in Hollywood and use it to study the causes of positive sorting on education in marriage. Actors in Hollywood do not meet their spouses in school, do not appear to earn wages that are correlated with their schooling, and are unlikely to choose their spouses on the basis of parental wealth. Despite these differences with the overall population, actors marry partners who are similar to themselves in terms of their educational background (the correlation of husband and wife years of schooling in Hollywood couples is 0.35, as opposed to 0.65 for the overall population). The proposed interpretation of this finding is that a nontrivial fraction of the observed sorting on education in US marriages is caused by factors other than sorting on earnings, sorting on parental wealth, and sorting that is induced by men and women meeting each other in school.;In the third chapter, I estimate and calibrate a marriage matching model to quantify the share of returns to education that is realized through marriage. In the model, more educated agents earn higher wages in the labor market, and are more productive in housework. Men and women who marry benefit from the presence of household public goods, complementarities in household production, and the division of Tabor between spouses. The predictions of the model are matched with NLSY data on sorting in marriage, and data on the allocation of time from the American Time Use Survey. Counterfactual analysis for men and women at age 40, suggests that better marital outcomes generate in the order of 35 percent of the return to education for women around middle age, and in the order of 10 percent of the corresponding return for men. |
