Educational Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality

2018/12/12 by Lasse Eika, Magne Mogstad, Basit Zafar · 14 citations
Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies #Labor market dynamics and wage inequality #Income, Poverty, and Inequality

paper · doi:10.1086/702018

Abstract

We use data from Denmark, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States to document the degree of educational assortative mating, how it evolves over time, and the extent to which it differs between countries. This descriptive analysis motivates and guides a decomposition analysis in which we quantify the contribution of various factors to the distribution of household income. We find that assortative mating accounts for a nonnegligible part of the cross-sectional inequality in household income in each country. However, changes in assortative mating over time barely move the time trends in household income inequality.

Citations

• Who Marries Whom and Why

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