Sex imbalance, marital matching and intra-household bargaining: Evidence from China

- Before the late 1980s, positive assortative matching dominated China's marital matching pattern.
- Since then, negative assortative matching, particularly female hypergamy, has prevailed.
- Under a higher sex imbalance, women have more bargaining power and marry up.
- Sex imbalance also enhances wives' power in intra-household resource allocation.

This paper studies the effects of sex imbalance on matching patterns in China's marriage markets. We hypothesize that the economic inequality caused by economic liberalization, together with sex imbalance, will lead to women's hypergamy (marrying up). Employing CGSS data, our empirical findings support the hypothesis. We also establish that sex imbalance enhances the postnuptial bargaining power of the wife vis-à-vis the husband in intra-household resource allocation. The findings are robust to IV estimation and robustness checks.