How the Swedish lottery explains one of the most invisible social phenomena in the West: hypergamy

A man who earns a million SEK is 30% more likely to get married

If the succession of economic crises we have experienced over the past quarter century has taught us anything, it is that domestic economy This affects family relationships, which is how people organize themselves in the smallest social unit we have, the family.

We now know a little better how this affects the economy, thanks to the work of an international team of economists. By analyzing a group of Swedish lottery winners, researchers found that not only did winning these prizes affect the formation and breakdown of families, but it also affected men and women differently.

The study in question has been published as a working paper National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an American think tank dedicated to economic analysis. That is, the research is still not peer reviewed. Its purpose, as explained in the document, is to promote discussion and comment.

The work analyzes marriages and divorces (depending, respectively, on whether the bonus goes to a single or married person), as well as fertility (in this case, regardless of marital status) in the short, medium and long term (two, five and ten years in advance) . winners of various Swedish lottery draws.

The analysis found that winning lottery prizes increased the likelihood of marriage and having children (regardless of whether there was a wedding), as well as an effect on divorce that was indistinguishable from zero.

But the authors highlight the gender breakdown in their results. The reason is that while when looking only at men the results are similar to the average in the short and medium term, for women the results were different.

In the case of men, winning the lottery one million crowns Swedish prices (about 90,000 euros at the exchange rate) suggested an increase in the probability of defects by 30% in the medium term (five years). Winning the lottery also implied a lower likelihood of divorce in the medium to long term for men. Winning the lottery also increased their fertility: one million crowns meant an average of 0.056 more children over the 10-year period, a small but significant change.

In contrast, the wealthy women in the sample did not change their behavior toward starting or expanding families, at least not significantly. Although the average results also showed a trend toward more marriages and more children, the difference with the general population was negligible.

A significant difference did appear in short-term divorces: winning the lottery made women chances of divorce Swedish women will increase in the short term. Of course, in the medium term the impact again became indistinguishable from the Swedish average, but disappeared after 10 years.

Open discussion

Lottery results help economists analyze wealth outcomes by avoiding some of the biases associated with variables correlated with the money we win. Because lotteries are random, some of these biases can be avoided. The researchers used three types of lottery draws conducted in Sweden, which resulted in a sample of 86,768 prizes for people aged 18 to 44 years. In addition to gender, the researchers take into account several other variables, such as educational level, age, or number of children at the time of receiving the award.

The presented results are somewhat tentative. As noted in the work, the work has not yet been peer-reviewed and is open to comments from the scientific community. A detail that eludes the analysis, for example, is the weight of gay marriage in the results.

The results are consistent with the idea of ​​hypergamy, the idea that (heterosexual) marriages are usually between men with higher socioeconomic status and a woman with fewer resources, which is not surprising given that men tend to have more income and resources than women.

“Such differential impacts may arise for a variety of reasons, such as because there is a strong social norm that idealizes the male head of household,” the authors explain, citing the fact that such effects can only arise as a result of differences in utility created by marriage for both sexes.

And all this despite the fact that Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest socio-economic gender inequality in the world. The Nordic country alternates between first and second place in the ranking based on glass ceiling index magazine Economist. The index and rankings attempt to measure “the role and influence of women” in the context of work and tend to be dominated by Nordic countries.

What we seem to be able to learn from this work is that, despite all the advances of recent centuries, some “common truths” have not changed much since Jane Austen’s time.

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Image | Pedestrian Hugo

*A previous version of this article was published March 2023.