Is Marriage A Normal Good? Evidence from NBA drafts

Little is known about the causal link between male economic status and marriage outcomes, owing to lack of data on unanticipated permanent income shocks for men. I tackle this by exploiting a natural experiment surrounding NBA drafts, an annual event where NBA teams draft college and international basketball players from 1st to 60th. Given high-quality expert predictions of player draft order and well-defined initial salaries decreasing monotonically by draft rank, I show that disparities between actual and predicted draft rank generate exogenous income shocks. This setup contributes novel income treatments that are not only large and individual-specific but also opportunely occurring early in both career and adult life, when marriage decisions are particularly salient. I additionally construct a new dataset tracking players’ major family decisions and am the first to show that marriage is indeed a normal good for men. All else equal, a 10% increase in initial five-year salary raises likelihood of marriage by 7.9% for the 2004-2013 draft cohorts. I argue my results constitute lower-bound estimates for general population men, as effect sizes are larger and more significant for lower expected salaries.

That is from Jiaqi Zou, who is on the job market from University of Toronto.  I like her statement of purpose: “I am particularly interested in identifying barriers and limiting beliefs that constrain individuals from their life’s pursuits.”