Educational Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality

Lasse Eika, Magne Mogstad and Basit Zafar

Journal of Political Economy, 2019, vol. 127, issue 6, 2795 - 2835

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.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (137)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/702018 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/702018 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Working Paper: Educational assortative mating and household income inequality (2014)
Working Paper: Educational Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality (2014)
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:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/702018

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().