Assist. Prof. Hyunjae (Jay) Kang

“Demand for Spousal Health”

This paper by Hyunjae Kang and Elena G. Capatina explores the importance of health for marital transitions and as a dimension for assortative mating. The researchers present new empirical patterns on marriage, divorce, and assortative mating in relation to health, constructed over time and by race using US data from 1996-2023. They document that high fractions of unhealthy individuals are single, lack health insurance, and relatively small fractions have healthy spouses. Unhealthy men have become significantly more likely to be single over time. Unhealthy individuals are also more likely to be divorced and remain single. When married, unhealthy individuals have high rates of unhealthy spouses (40-45%), higher probabilities of “marrying down” in terms of education, and women have husbands with lower incomes (conditional on everything else) compared to their healthy counterparts. These findings have important implications for the design of health and social insurance programs which interact closely with intra-household insurance. Preliminary analysis shows the ACA is associated with a lower penalty of bad health in the marriage market. Finally, the gain to marriage for females with low education but good health surpasses that of females with high education but poor health. Conversely, the gain to marriage for males exhibit the opposite pattern.

Hyunjae (Jay) Kang studies topics in labor economics and family economics. His current research interests are 1) the motivation and economic consequences of parental investment, 2) marriage market dynamics and 3) fertility choice. He uses various applied econometrics techniques, including structural estimation, randomized control trials, quasi-experimental methods, and non-parametric estimation.

Hyunjae (Jay) Kang is Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at the Institute of Economic Research at Kyoto University. He earned his PhD in Economics at Stony Brook University. He also holds a BA in Political Science from Dongguk University as well as a BA in Economics from Stony Brook University.