生育指标和婚姻匹配*
HOUSEHOLDWISE BIRTH QUOTA ASSIGNMENT AND MARRIAGE MARKET

摘要 本文通过研究中国计划生育政策改革来检验贝克尔（Becker）关于婚姻的经济学理论。中国从20世纪80年代起实行“一胎化”政策，但随后逐渐允许夫妻均为独生子女的家庭生育第二胎，即“双独二胎”政策。由于“双独二胎”实施前不同省份“一胎化”政策的执行力度不同，所以放开“双独二胎”在不同省份间的政策效果也不同。笔者利用政策实施时间前后和省份间政策力度的差异，采用二重差分的实证设计进行分析，发现“双独二胎”政策增加了独生子女之间的匹配，减少了独生子女和非独生子女的“混合匹配”。笔者建立搜寻—匹配模型对“双独二胎”政策如何影响婚姻市场均衡进行分析。二重差分的实证分析得到的证据与模型的推论相一致，实证结果在一系列检验中保持稳健。
Abstract： This paper tests Beckers economic model of marriage by investigating the effects of Chinas family planning policy reform on marriage market. The reform assigns an additional birth quota to families comprising onlychild husband and wife. A DifferenceInDifferences analysis shows increasing assortative matching along the dimension of being only children after the implementation, and that such changes are greater in provinces with more restrictive family planning policies prior to the reform. By developing a matching and search model, we show that if onlychild agents are more willing to marry onlychild spouses to take the advantage of the second birth quota assignment, they will be less selective on potential spouses who are only children and more selective on those with siblings. This negative spillover effect on the agents with siblings reduces their expected utility from random search and therefore leads them to lower their screening threshold on marriage market. It follows that matching quality decreases among same onlychildstatus marriages and increase among different onlychildstatus marriages after the reform.