The Marriage Market

Economist Eric Gould runs some numbers about men, careers, and marriage:

In this paper I develop a dynamic programming model of the joint career and marital decisions of young men between the ages of 16 and 39. The results show that labor market decisions are strongly influenced by their returns in the marriage market. If there were no returns to career choices in the marriage market, men would tend to work less, study less, and choose blue-collar jobs over white-collar jobs. These results suggest that the existing literature underestimates the true returns to human capital investments by ignoring their returns in the marriage market.

Although as one of the commenters on Matt Yglesias' blog put it, this might be

Because there’s no phenomenon for which economists can’t create a model that confirms what they already believe.