What mom and dad’s match means for junior: Marital sorting and child outcomes

• Estimates of an empirical marital matching model show high levels of assortative matching and marital surplus for similarity in partner characteristics like education, age and religion.
• Marital surplus is significantly associated with indices of child quality, as measured by cognitive test scores.
• Marital surplus remains statistically significant after controlling for individual parental characteristics, suggesting that the marital match itself plays an important role in child outcomes.

This paper employs recently developed marital matching models to examine empirically the role played by marital sorting in observed measures of marital production. Using the US Collaborative Perinatal Project (CPP), a large-scale study from the 1960s, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY), we find that marital surplus is strongly correlated with indices of child quality, as measured by cognitive test scores, and with the durability of the marital union. At ages beyond infancy, the correlation between cognitive outcomes and marital surplus is robust to the inclusion of the parental characteristics that generate the match, suggesting that the correlation represents effects of the match itself. High marital surplus is associated with assortative mating on education and age, suggesting complementarity in parental inputs in child production. Our results suggest that marital surplus is an important input for child quality above and beyond its indirect effects on marital stability.