Essays on Education and the Marriage Market
By: Danyan Zha
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2019
Place of publication: [New York, N.Y.?]
Language: eng
Description: Chapter one of this thesis examines one of the largest primary school construction program, INPRES SD, in late 1970s in Indonesia. Using the variation across regions in the number of schools constructed and the variation across birth cohorts, I show that in densely populated areas, primary school construction did not affect primary school attainment rate. More surprisingly, the program decreased secondary school attainment rate for both men and women due to a crowding out of teacher resources. Chapter two of this thesis examines how education distribution affects the marriage market, in particular, female marriage age. I first develop a two-to-one dimensional matching model with transferable utility in an OLG framework, in which the marital surplus allows complementarity between men's education and both characteristics of women: education and youth, to understand how female marriage age is affected by others' education.I then use INPRES SD as a quasi-natural experiment and find that a woman marries earlier and the spousal age gap increases when fewer women in her birth cohort graduate from secondary school and the education distribution of their potential husbands does not change.The empirical finding suggests that men's education and women's young age are complementary in generating the marital surplus in the current setting.

Chapter three of this thesis examines how hukou system affects the marriage market in China. I build a bidimensional matching model in which individuals are determined by a continuous attribute (that indicates social economic status) and a discrete attribute (hukou status, either rural or urban). Urban hukou is more valuable for men than women since it's more likely for a woman to move to her husband's location upon marriage in a patrilocal society. The model gives predictions on the matching patterns which are validated using the China 2000 0.095% sample census.
Notes: Department: Economics.

Thesis advisor: Pierre A. Chiappori.

Thesis advisor: Bernard Salanie.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2019.