Abstract
This paper aims at explaining why education reduces female marriage market attractiveness, while the opposite is typically true for men. We assume that women are ranked according to their take home pay and time spent doing household work. We explicitly consider the role of job satisfaction for labour supply. The argument is that job satisfaction could induce women to work too much from the point ofview of their partners. The result is that under low wage dispersion educated women are out-competed by less educated women for husbands, while under high wage dispersion, the marriage squeeze would affect poorly educated women. Heavy taxation and low returns to education are factors which compress the (net) wage distribution. We argue that the particularly low marriageability ofbetter educated women in Sweden and the low propensity to marry among poorly educated women in the US could be a result of differences in the wage distribution in the two countries.