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

Our approach clearly relies on speci…c and strong assumptions. One dimensionality is a
serious restriction, if only because it assumes that a woman’s attractiveness involves the same
arguments with identical weighting for all men (and conversely). Still, it can be seen as a
…rst and parsimounious step in a promising direction - i.e., including several dimensions in
the empirical analysis of matching. Although we are interested here in marriage markets,
other applications (to labor markets in particular) could also be considered.
Perhaps the
main contribution of this paper is to show that models of this type, once correctly speci…ed,
can generate strong testable restrictions, and that the latter do not seem to be obviously
counterfactual.
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