Love Match, Marriage Distance, and Marriage Payment: Evidence from Rural China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors analyze a very interesing and important issue in rural China. They emphasize the importance of this issue in the context of previous literature and the real life of rural China.

Research is well designed and the results are well presented. 

It would be better, if possible, if they considered the effect of family income and wealth as well as groom's occupation. If family income/wealth increases, they may make a larger or smaller payment. High income/wealth families may be willing to make higher marriage payment. Or, if higher wealth indicates family pride or the change that the family will help the couple in the future, the marriage payment may be smaller. And if the groom has a respected occupation with good earnings potential in the future, then the groom's family may demand a higher payment from the bride's family. If they have data for these variables, it will be interesting to analyze the effects of these factors on marriage payment. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for these constructive and helpful comments. In line with your suggestions, we originally want to control family income or wealth and groom’s occupation, but these variables are only collected in the survey years. However, 78.61% couples in our sample got married before 2005, which is the first survey year of this panel data. It means that we don’t have these data just before they got married. We believe that current family income or wealth and groom’s occupation cannot affect the marriage payment behaviours many years ago. We try our best to alleviate this effect by following ways. First, we control village dummies to control economic status at the village level, which reflect the average family income or wealth to some extent. Second, we use the variable of educational attainment to control the effect of groom’s occupation before getting married. Educational attainment is one kind of important human capital, which is highly related to occupation, earning ability, and wage (Heckman, J. J., 2005). Additionally, educational attainment is much stable for Chinese population once they finish schooling. These comments are very meaningful, and we hope to make new progress in data collection to investigate the effects of these variables.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

1. Generally speaking, there is a lot of awkward phrasing that could be improved.
2. I think you need to explain you’re the term “long marriage distance” earlier in the paper. You explain later, I think, that long marriage distance refers to a farther distance from place of birth (if I’m not mistaken). This needs to be explained/defined at the beginning of the paper. If it is, it is unclear.
3. Lines 34-34: There are two ways of matching couples: love matches and arranged marriages.
4. Line 45, of whose economic situation? The couple’s?
5. Line 46—match types?
6. Line 52—what does “partly unobservable” mean?
7. Line 63, in solving the marriage squeeze. (what does this mean?)
8. Lines 118-120, is a son, who is primary… (This sentence doesn’t make sense. It needs to be reworked)
9. Line 153, what is “unban” couples? This might need to be defined/explained
10. Line 155, those who married for love ?
11. Line 164, Suggestion: However, other studies found that a female migrant might marry a man distant from her natal family in exchange for a more desirable location and an improvement of her economic well-being.
12. Line 169, suggestion: a couple from the same area, within the same intermarriage circle, with similar personal characteristics and living habits, is more likely to have less conflict and stay married.
13. Lines 175-176, what does this sentence mean? You might want to clarify

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper empirically demonstrates the correlation between matching ways
of couples and marriage payments behaviors in rural China. 

The paper's overall level is right: it is well written even if it is quite simple, and some important considerations are highlighted.

Few recommendations:

1)First of all, a fundamental remark is that the article is not providing the link with the profile of the journal "Sustainability".

2) Please formulate the research questions as hypotheses.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf