A Comment on Assortative Matching at the Top of the Distribution: Evidence from the World's Most Exlusive Marriage Market (2022)
Goni (2022) relies on a novel data on peerage marriages in Britain to examine the impact of matching technology on marital sorting. He relies on the London Season interruption (1861{1863) as a natural experiment that raised search costs and reduced market segregation. In his preferred speci cation, he exploits exogenous variation in women's probability to marry during the interruption for their age in 1861 and nds that the interruption increased the probability of marrying a commoner; reduced the probability of marrying an heir, increased the di erence in spouses' family landholdings (in absolute value); decreased the di erence in spouses' family landholdings (husband - wife); and increased the likelihood of never getting married (See Table 2, columns 1 to 6, respectively). First, we reproduce the paper's main ndings and nd no coding errors. Second, we test the robustness of the results to (1) the use of additional xed e ects and (2) sample restrictions. Finally, we examine the heterogeneous e ects of this interruption by age and year. We nd that original estimates are robust and are not signi cantly a ected using these alternative speci cations.