and measures of inputs to sharable household goods such as the number of children, the son's belief in old age support, and the submissiveness of the daughter-in-law.

Comparison across parental and self matching largely supports our theoretical predictions. In both rural and urban areas, parent-involved matches yield a lower marital harmony; in contrast, parent-matched marriages yield higher couple income in urban areas, but lower income in rural areas, all after we control for individual-level observable and unobservable attributes that may lead to selection in parental matchmaking. In rural areas, parent-matched marriages are associated with more children. Moreover, wives in parent-matched marriages tend to hold more traditional views that emphasize women's secondary status within a family. The dierent results in rural and urban areas can be explained by relative abundance of labor market opportunities and weaker traditional beliefs in urban relative to rural areas. Our results are consistent with Becker, Murphy and Spenkuch (2015): parents can meddle with children's (or children-in-law's) preferences to ensure old age support. We further provide evidence that parental matchmaking is an important vehicle to achieve this goal.

In addition to oering evidence in support of BMS (2015), this paper contributes to the marriage literature by highlighting the economic tradeo in parental matchmaking. Unlike the classical focus on the eects of sex ratio (Angrist 2002), divorce law (Chiappori 2002), or educational composition on marriage outcomes, we show that the institutional details of how the match is accomplished in the rst place have important implications on marriage outcomes.<sup>3</sup> In a related paper, Edlund and Lagerlof (2006) show that the shift from parental to individual consent in marriage allows the young couple instead of their parents to receive the bride price and thus facilitates economic growth. We dier in that our focus is not on who controls resources in a marriage, but on the economic tradeo of parental matchmaking for both parents and children. The tradeo between love and money has been explored by Fernandez et al. (2005) but from the perspective of marriage sorting on skills and its relationship with income inequality; they do not discuss matchmaking methods.<sup>4</sup> Our paper is also related to Cheung (1972), who argues that many traditional Chinese family practices,<sup>5</sup> including marriage patterns, are shaped by parental considerations to maximize family wealth. That paper does not focus on the eect of matchmaking methods; neither does it oer empirical evidence.

In a short paper, Huang, Jin and Xu (2012) use the same data source to examine the

> 3Some other papers related to marriage include Zhang and Chan (1999), Foster and Rosenzweig (2000), Chiappori et al. (2002), Suen, Chan and Zhang (2003), and Huang et al. (2009).

> 4See also Blood (1967) for descriptive analysis of love and arranged marriages.

> 5China-specic papers and books on marriage include Chao (1983), Xu and Whyte (1990), Cohen (1992), and Zimmer and Kwong (2003), none of which examines how parent matchmaking aects marriage outcomes and how considerations of old age support aect these eects.

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