Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality

By Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, Cezar Santos. Social Science Research Network, 2014

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Has there been an increase in positive assortative mating? Does assortative mating contribute to household income inequality? Data from the United States Census Bureau suggests there has been a rise in assortative mating. Additionally, assortative mating affects household income inequality. In particular, if matching in 2005 between husbands and wives had been random, instead of the pattern observed in the data, then the Gini coefficient would have fallen from the observed 0.43 to 0.34, so that income inequality would be smaller. Thus, assortative mating is important for income inequality. The high level of married female labor-force participation in 2005 is important for this result.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/102a52723c9a922a9fd836440a15d175853854f1

Citations in the corpus

• Partner Choice, Investment in Children, and the Marital College Premium (2017, unknown): “This vision has recently been emphasized by Greenwood et al (2014), who find that “if people matched in 2005 according to the 1960 standardized mating pattern there would be a significant reduction in income inequality; i.e., the Gini drops from 0.43 to 0.35.””
• Families in Macroeconomics (2016, unknown): “Greenwood et al. (2016) analyze such a link in a structural quantitative model.”
• A Theory of Intergenerational Mobility (2018, unknown): “Greenwood et al. (2014) provide further evidence of an increase in assortative mating, and”