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Table 5 one can see that shorter women tend to be married to unhealthier men. We also
find evidence of positive sorting in both anthropometric measures, as heavier men are
more likely to be married to heavier women, and taller men to taller women.
Our analysis of male anthropometric measures suggests that husbands’ height
plays a more relevant role in the marriage market than their weight. A husband’s being
overweight is associated with his wife being shorter (Table 7), while there are no
socioeconomic penalties. Higher income men tend to be heavier, but heavier women
tend to be married to heavier men. Additionally, women who are educationally and
physically inferior (heavier) marry shorter men, as reported in Table 8. This finding that
a husband’s greater height is a marriage-market premium is consistent with evidence
that women prefer taller men (Ellis, 1992). These findings also confirm the spouses’
positive assortative mating in both height and weight.
3.2 Measuring attractiveness
In our framework, anthropometric characteristics (height and BMI) are measures of
physical attractiveness (i.e., beauty), while socioeconomic characteristics (earnings) are
measures of socioeconomic attractiveness. Specifically, our evidence is consistent with
BMI being a measure of both male and female physical attractiveness, whereas height is
mainly a measure of male physical attractiveness. In this subsection, we address the
validity of our main measure of physical attractiveness, namely, BMI. The validity of
height as a measure of male physical attractiveness, but not of female physical
attractiveness, has been extensively discussed in the literature (see Herpin (2005) for
detailed references).
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