Gender Differences in Educational Attainment and International Marriages

This paper studies the effects of gender differences in educational attainment on international marriages. Data from "Manpower Survey" show that the probabilities of getting married for both men with low education and women with higher education is decreasing as the educational gap shrinks. Hypogamy in educational attainment indeed exists in the marriage market. Furthermore, using individual data from 2000 Census, multinomial logit regressions show that the increase of men's average years of schooling will reduce the probability of marrying both foreign brides and foreign grooms. Finally, compare to their counterparts in domestic marriages, men marrying foreign birdes are less educated while women marrying foreign grooms are better educated. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the decrease of geneder gap in educational attainment leads to the phenomenon of international marriages.