Education (and age) versus fertility in the U.S. marriage market

 Markets change over time, including the marriage market.  American marriages have become more assortative in recent years, and it appears that, in the 21st Century, women no longer pay a 'marriage penalty' (measured in spousal income) for graduate education.

The Human Capital–Reproductive Capital Trade-Off in Marriage Market Matching, by Corinne Low, Journal of Political Economy Volume 132, Number 2, February 2024

"Abstract: Throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between women’s human capital and men’s income was nonmonotonic: while college-educated women married richer spouses than high school–educated women, graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women. This can be rationalized by a bidimensional matching framework where women’s human capital is negatively correlated with another valuable trait: fertility, or reproductive capital. Such a model predicts nonmonotonicity in income matching with a sufficiently high income distribution of men. A simulation of the model using US Census fertility and income data shows that it can also predict the recent transition to more assortative matching as desired family sizes have fallen."

Notable sentence about the ancien regime: "I provide a simple condition such that there always exists a man rich enough that he prefers a higher fertility but poorer woman to a richer and less fertile woman."

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And here's an earlier paper on fertility (through IVF) and age of marriage in Israel:

Gershoni, Naomi, and Corinne Low. 2021. "Older Yet Fairer: How Extended Reproductive Time Horizons Reshaped Marriage Patterns in Israel." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 13 (1): 198-234.

"Abstract: Israel's 1994 adoption of free in vitro fertilization (IVF) provides a natural experiment for how fertility time horizons impact women's marriage timing and other outcomes. We find a substantial increase in average age at first marriage following the policy change, using both men and Arab-Israeli women as comparison groups. This shift appears to be driven by both increased marriages by older women and younger women delaying marriage. Age at first birth also increased. Placebo and robustness checks help pinpoint IVF as the source of the change. Our findings suggest age-limited fertility materially impacts women's life timing and outcomes relative to men."