Education Expansion, Assortative Marriage, and Income Inequality in China

Haifeng Nie () and Chunbing Xing
Additional contact information
Haifeng Nie: Sun Yat-Sen University

No 11573, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We use census and household survey data to document China's educational assortative marriage and its evolution between 1990 and 2009. Empirical results suggest that men are increasingly likely to marry with women with similar education levels in China since the early 1990s, which is also true for urban areas and for different provinces. We then calculate the counterfactual Gini coefficients that would prevail if marriage matching was random in terms of education. For China in 2005, the inequality of per capita household income would drop from 0.508 to 0.476 if marriage was random. For urban areas in 2009, assortative marriage in education also increased the Gini coefficients by around 2 percentage points (from 0.316 to 0.337). The decomposition exercise shows that the increase in the return to education is the major contributor to the increase in urban household income inequality between 1990 and 2009, and the change in the assortative marriage pattern plays a minor role.

Keywords: assortative marriage; education expansion; income inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2018-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: China Economic Review, 2019, 55, 37 - 51

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11573.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Education expansion, assortative marriage, and income inequality in China (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11573

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().