Joe Price

I work with Dan Lichter and Jeff Swigert. We have been examining the degree to which there is a structural mismatch in the marriage market. We have data on about 4% of Americans where we match single women in the survey to married women that otherwise have similar characteristics. We use the characteristics of the husbands of those matches to determine the likely characteristics of each single woman’s husband if she were married, which we call her “synthetic husband.” These synthetic husbands answer important questions about why there is such an imbalance in the marriage market and what the imbalance looks like.