Several theoretical contributions have argued that the returns to schooling
within marriage play a crucial role for human capital investments. Our paper
quanti es the evolution of these returns over the last decades. We consider
a frictionless matching framework a la Becker-Shapley-Shubik, in which the
gain generated by a match between two individuals is the sum of a systematic
e ect that only depends on the spouses’ education classes and a match-speci c
term that we treat as random; following Choo and Siow (2006), we assume the
latter component has an additively separable structure. We derive a complete,
theoretical characterization of the model. We show that if the supermodularity
of the surplus function is invariant over time and errors have extreme value
distributions with time-invariant but education-dependent variances, the model
is overidenti ed. We apply our method to US data on individuals born between
1943 and 1972. Our model ts the data very closely; moreover, we nd that
the deterministic part of the surplus is indeed supermodular and that, in line
with theoretical predictions, the marital college premium” has increased for
women but not for men over the period.