Parents as Matchmakers Have Ulterior Motives (Of Course)

choi

(1) Laurie Burkitt, Parent Meddling Makes for Unmerry Marriages in China: Report. China Real Time, Feb 11, 2015 (blog)
blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/02/11/new-study-casts-skeptical-eye-on-parental-matchmaking-in-china/
("Researchers surveyed 3,400 rural couples and 3,800 urban couples in seven provinces across China in 1991. While the data might be old, said Colin Xu, one of the authors, parental influence remains important in Chinese culture")

My comment: Why is the report published now, more than 20 years later?  I guess the three economist found old data and make the best use of it. fter all, Dr Xu (see next) could not have collected the data himself, because he was a PhD student at Chicago. (Incidentally, Dr Xu said PhD took him seven years to complete. Economics is a totally different discipline from mine (biology). But I had roommates  in eqarly 1990s who were PhD students at MIT, and they claimed, separately, it took about four years.)


(2) Fali Huang, Ginger Zhe Jin and Lixin Colin Xu 徐立新, Love, Money, and Old Age Support; Does Parental matchmaking matter?  Finance and Private Sector Development Team, Development Research Group, World Bank 世界银行 发展研究局 金融与私有企业发展研究处, Feb 1, 2015 (Policy Research Working Paper WPS7188)
www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2015/02/03/000158349_20150203095825/Rendered/PDF/WPS7188.pdf

abstract in toto: "Parental involvement in matchmaking may distort the choice of spouse because parents are willing to substitute love for market and household production, which are more sharable between parents and their children. This paper finds supportive evidence in a survey of Chinese couples. In both rural and urban areas, parent matchmaking is associated with less marital harmony between the couple, more submissive wives, and a stronger belief in old age support for the son. In contrast, its association with couple income differs by rural and urban regions, perhaps because of differences in earning opportunities and in the enforcement of the one-child policy. Moreover, parent matchmaking is associated with more children for the couple and lower schooling for wives only in rural areas. Thus, in places with a stronger need for old age support, parents tend to be involved in matchmaking and use it to select submissive daughters-in-law to ensure old age support. The results render support to Becker, Murphy and Spenckuch (2015), who imply that parents would meddle with children's preferences to ensure their commitment to providing old age support

My comment:
(a)
(i) 徐立新, 芝大留级记﹙上﹚. 经济导报, Nov 22, 2013
www.21ccom.net/articles/rwcq/article_2013112295804.html
(拉斯·汉森--岳父蒋硕杰 [Chiang Shuo-chieh or Shuo-chieh Chang or Shochieh Tsiang (1918-1993; 湖北應城人，生于上海; BS and PhD, London School of Economics)]--的金融计量课 financial econometrics)

"我文章题目是芝大留级记。说实话，我本来6年能毕业，但第一年没找到满意的工作，被迫延长一年。"  I read several times for details, and YET Dr Xu did not explain further.
(ii) 徐立新, 芝大留级记﹙下﹚. 经济导报 , Dec 11, 2013.
www.21ccom.net/articles/rwcq/article_2013121196825.html
(iii) Lars Peter Hansen - Facts. Nobel Prize in Economics, 2013
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ ... 3/hansen-facts.html
(shared with Eugene L Fama and Robert J Shiller, each 1/3, all on stock fluctuations)

Dr Hansen earned PhD from University of Minnesota in 1978.
(iv)
(A) "Financial econometrics has been defined as the application of statistical techniques to problems in finance."  Wikipedia
(B) "Econometrics is the application of mathematics, statistical methods, and computer science, to economic data * * * Econometrics is the intersection of economics, mathematics, and statistics." Wikipedia

(b) What does this clause in the abstract means: "its association with couple income differs by rural and urban regions"?

The working paper at pages 4-5 (in the section of Introduction) summaries as follows in two paragraphs:

"We take these predictions to a sample of about 3400 rural couples and 3800 urban couples in 1991 in seven Chinese provinces. Here 48% of rural couples and 14.5% of urban couples were married by parent-involved matchmaking; the rest by either self search or friend introduction (both of which are referred to as self match). We examine a number of marriage outcomes, including the degree of domestic harmony to capture the emotional output of marriage, the joint income of husband and wife to capture the couple's economic well-being, 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 dfferent 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.