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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.

Key words: marriage matching , assortativeness , One Child policy , fertility