Would you gladly accept all-stock bonuses if you didn’t have to worry about RBS debt not impressing your girl (would-be wife or favorite Flashdancer)? This guy says yes. He also posits that in this world sans ladies (or sans the ladies who care about the size of your package), you people probably wouldn’t have gone into your chosen professions at all, nor would you have stressed about things like learning to read.

This paper examines the extent to which human capital and career decisions are affected by their potential returns in the marriage market. Although schooling and career decisions often are made before getting married, these decisions are likely to affect the future chances of receiving a marriage offer, the type of offer, and the probability of getting divorced. Therefore, I estimate a forward‐looking model of the marriage and career decisions of young men between the ages of 16 and 39. The results show that if there were no returns to career choices in the marriage market, men would tend to work less, study less, and choose blue‐collar jobs over white‐collar jobs.

Most Men Would Be Complete Slackers if They Didn’t Have to Impress Women [Daily Intel]