Meeting at School. Assortative Matching in Partnerships and Over-Education

Alessandro Tampieri

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: This paper argues that assortative matching may explain over-education. Education determines individuals' income and, due to the presence of assortative matching, the quality of the partner, who can be a colleague or a spouse. Thus an individual acquires some education to improve the expected partner's quality. But since everybody does that, the partner's quality does not increase and over-education emerges. Tax progression to correct over-education has ambiguous effects on the educational incentives according to the individuals' ability. We test the model using the British Household Panel Survey. The empirical results support our theoretical findings.

JEL-codes: I21 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ure
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Related works:
Working Paper: The Sex and the Uni: Educational Assortative Matching the Over-Education* (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp726

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