Our researcher Wenchao LI from the Department of Economics and Finance had her article accepted and published by the Journal of Political Economy, a top international economics journal. This article explores the far-reaching effects of marriage market matching and investments based on marital matching considerations on future matching equilibrium outcomes, marital stability, interspousal resource allocation, fertility decisions, and the human capital development of the investee. Therefore, research on the theoretical aspects of this area is of great academic importance and has received widespread attention from economists worldwide. Based on this background, the paper combines the actual characteristics and patterns of the Chinese marriage market, creatively introduces the concept of multidimensional investment in the matching model, and examines the impact of marriage market imbalance. In the matching theory model derived in the paper, the imperfect family contract assumption is used to divide pre-matching investment into two components: investment in public goods (e.g., housing) and private goods (e.g., personal education); the former is more attractive due to its non-exclusivity, which better provides a credible commitment to share resources with the match afterwards. As a result, there is an incentive for the matching parties in the market to invest more in public goods than in private goods, which would lead to investments that are no longer socially efficient. Under conditions of gender imbalance, the higher proportion of parties in the market over-invest in public goods more severely and more inefficiently.

Title: Multidimensional Premarital Investments with Imperfect Commitment

Journal: Journal of Political Economy

Author: V. Bhaskar, Wenchao Li, and Junjian Yi

Journal of Political Economy, is one of the top five journals in economics and also one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in the field of economics. The journal has a JCR impact factor of 9.637 in 2021, a JCR five-year impact factor of 11.087, a CiteScore of 13.1, and an SJR index of 18.476. The journal is ranked No. 3 in the Scimago Journal Ranking “Economics and Econometrics” index and No. 4 in Google Scholar’s “Economics” category.
In the last five years (until 2020), only 6 papers have been published in the journal by academic institutions in mainland China; only 9 papers have been published since its inception.

Source: Tongji University economics ranking statistics (https://econtop.uvt.nl/rankingsandbox.php)