On balance, however, empirical evidence on the social and economic consequences of widespread marriage delay for males remains an underdeveloped literature.<sup>6</sup> Even less is understood regarding the specifics of this impending collapse: which men will fail to marry, where these problems will emerge, and what should be done now to prepare. Studies have projected China’s sex ratio in future years and imbalances in the marriage market (Tuljapurkar et al. 1995, Zeng et al 2007), but no study to our knowledge has examined the spatial distribution of the predicted problems in China’s marriage market, and the possibility that geographical clustering of bachelors may alter the impact of the national bride shortage. This paper attempts to provide answers to these questions.

We demonstrate two key facts regarding the Chinese marriage market using historical census microdata from 1990 and 2000. First, economic status is a crucial predictor of marital probability for men in China. We use years of education as the closest proxy for status, and document that while there is almost universal marriage for highly educated men, lower rates of marriage prevail among men of lower education. By contrast, the marriage market for women cleared: women across the educational distribution enjoy nearly universal marriage, and are able to engage in hypergamy, choosing spouses of higher status and income. Second, since many women migrate for the purpose of marriage, it seems very likely that in the coming decades the collapse of marital prospects for men will occur in poor areas of the country with low educational attainment.

Recognizing these patterns observed historically for marriage in China (Table 1), we apply a macro-simulation of China’s marriage market in the 21<sup>st</sup> century (Ebenstein & Sharygin 2009). Our marriage rule assumes hypergamous partner preferences on the part of women, meaning that women will marry men of higher education and income when possible, and will migrate to wealthier areas in pursuit of higher status males. Using this framework, and the known relative distribution of educational attainment of males, we project the geographic distribution of the unmarried men and calculate a forecast of the proportions of adult men who are married overall and by education, casting light on the impending demographic pressures on China’s marriage market.

The results paint a grim picture for China’s ability to care for these men under the current policy structure of social assistance and social insurance programs that are primarily locally funded (Wang 2006, World Bank 2009). We estimate that in the absence of major redistribution of education and employment opportunities across China, the marriage squeeze will be in China’s poorer regions with large minority populations.<sup>7</sup> Thus it will not necessarily be the more prosperous eastern regions of China with the most skewed sex ratio at birth that will experience high marriage failure rates among men. Rather, the poorer provinces ─ with more balanced sex ratios at birth ─ will bear a disproportionate share of the social and economic burden of China’s unmarried and childless men.

> 6 A surplus of young single men may generate economic benefits the result is fewer dependents and more time spent working; however, downstream costs may outweigh benefits if such men become a cost to society through increased problem behaviors or costs for old age support. We refer the reader to extensive literature regarding demographic dividends (Wang & Mason 2005), through which a population’s age distribution plays a role in economic growth.

> 7 Province-level results are calculated by applying education-specific rates of male marriage failure to the distribution of males age 6+ by education within each province from the China 2000 Census 0.1% microdata, which is biased slightly upwards due to the higher percentage of males with uncompleted education.

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