Educational Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality

By Lasse Eika, Magne Mogstad, basit. zafar. Journal of Political Economy, 2019

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c803dd56c997a6dc3abe9f9e9daea0ea4c7f77e5

Citations in the corpus

• Human Capital Investments and Expectations about Career and Family (2016, unknown): “The expectations reported in this table are those weighted by the individual-specific probability of choosing each of the majors.(25) Panel A of Table 12 compares expected earnings in 2010 with actual earnings in 2016.”