Debate rages over what type of older women pair up with younger men:
In an April paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics, University of Colorado economists Hani Mansour and Terra McKinnish analyzed census, health, and cognitive data on thousands of married couples to test common stereotypes about cougars and their more traditional counterparts, sugar daddies (older, wealthy men who marry young, attractive women). They found that couples in which one partner is significantly older than the other scored lower on measures of attractiveness, income, education, and intelligence, than couples in which both partners were similar in age. …
But economist Melvyn Coles isn’t convinced. He and University of Essex colleague Marco Francesconi wrote in a 2011 paper that the cougar phenomenon, while still rare, has been growing since 1970 and is more likely to occur when the woman has higher levels of education and professional success. Looking at data from the United Kingdom and the United States, they reported that unions in which the woman is five or more years older than the man increased from about about three percent in 1970 to more than eight percent in 2000. Digging deeper into this subset, and including women who had divorced as well as those in their first marriage, they found that women with higher education and professional levels are 45 percent more likely than the average woman to be in what they call a “toyboy” relationship.
The Dish 