Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality

Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov and Cezar Santos

No 23, Economie d'Avant Garde Research Reports from Economie d'Avant Garde

Abstract: An increase in positive assortative mating is documented for the period 1960 to 2005, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Thus, people are more likely today than in the past to marry someone from the same educational class. How does this shift in marital sorting affect household income inequality? The analysis finds that the rise in assortative mating, per se, has had a very modest impact on household income inequality. By contrast, another change in marriage patterns, the dramatic uptick in the number of single households, appears to have a stronger connection with widening income inequality. This is a revised version of the 2014 AER P&P paper based on the 2015 corrigendum.

Keywords: Assortative mating; contingency table; Gini coefficient; income inequality; Lorenz curve; married female labor-force participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J11 J12 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality (2015)
Working Paper: Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality (2015)
Journal Article: Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality (2014)
Working Paper: Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality (2014)
Working Paper: Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality (2014)
Working Paper: Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality (2014)
Working Paper: Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality (2014)
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