Women have overtaken men in education, yet the marriage market has adjusted only partly. Using Danish administrative registers for 1980–2013, we document that the share of couples in which the wife is more educated (female hypogamy) rose from 15 to 27 percent and overtook the reverse pattern (female hypergamy) around 2004. Hypogamy, however, remains less common than under random matching. Investigating this puzzle, we document new facts on the distribution of singles, marriage formation, and heterogeneous, duration-dependent divorce risk. These facts motivate an equilibrium search model of the marriage market with transferable utility, household production, endogenous divorce, and dynamic selection. Decomposing the hypogamy trend with the estimated model, we find that changes in the education mix account for about three quarters of the rise. Net of composition, the trend is driven by changing norms regarding partnership formation, partly offset by more low-educated men remaining single; wages, household technology and bargaining power play only minor roles.
Joint with Frederik Almar, Bastian Schulz, and Pengpeng Xiao.