Fatter attraction: anthropometric and socioeconomic matching ... - Ivie

of) overweight women.
All in all, these tables are consistent with the basic story presented above. Assortative
matching takes place along the two dimensions of physical and socioeconomic attractiveness;
moreover, a trade-o¤ seems to exist, whereby a lower level of physical attractiveness can be
compensated by better socioeconomic characteristics and conversely. However, while these
…ndings are globally supportive of our theory, they do not constitute clean tests of it. Developing
such tests is the topic of the next section.
6 Formal test and estimation
6.1 A linear speci…cation
In order to formally implement the model, we …rst need to further specify its form. We start
with the benchmark case in which the functions I and J in (1) are linear, similarly to Hitsch
et al. (2010):
I X 1 i ; :::; X K i
J Yj 1 ; :::; Yj
L
X
= f k Xi
k
k
=
X
We have concluded above that the distribution of any female characteristic conditional on the
l
g l Y l
j
husband’s pro…le
X 1 i ; :::; X K i
only depends on I X
1
i ; :::; X K i
: It follows from (3) that, for
any female characteristic s:
@E Yj
s
@E Yj
s
j X 1 ; :::; X K =@X n
j X 1 ; :::; X K =@X = f n
m f m
and by the same token:
@E X s i j Y 1 ; :::; Y L =@Y n
@E [X s i j Y 1 ; :::; Y L ] =@Y m = g n
g m
17