Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality

Greenwood, Jeremy; Guner, Nezih; Kocharkov, Georgi; Santos, Cezar

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2385152

Cited by 20 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In the U.S. context, Western et al (2008) found that neither educational inequalities in women’s incomes nor assortative mating contributed significantly to the rise in inequality. Similar results for the United States were found by Breen and Salazar (2011) , Eika et al (2019) , and Greenwood et al (2014) . In the European context, similar results were documented by Breen and Salazar (2010) for the United Kingdom and by Boertien and Permanyer (2019) for a subset of 21 countries.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…To properly measure educational assortative mating, I follow an approach similar to that of Eika et al (2019) and Greenwood et al (2014) based on contingency tables and marital sorting parameters. For every given marriage cohort, each cell in the contingency table gives the observed fraction of partnered households that occurs in a specific educational pairing.…”

Section: Educational Assortative Matingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Educational Assortative Mating in Sub-Saharan Africa: Compositional Changes and Implications for Household Wealth Inequality

Pesando

2021

Demography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is undergoing rapid transformations in the realm of union formation in tandem with significant educational expansion and rising labor force participation rates. Concurrently, the region remains the least developed and most unequal along multiple dimensions of human and social development. In spite of this unique scenario, never has the social stratification literature examined patterns and implications of educational assortative mating for inequality in SSA. Using 126 Demographic and Health Surveys from 39 SSA countries between 1986 and 2016, this study is the first to document changing patterns of educational assortative mating by marriage cohort, subregion, and household location of residence and relate them to prevailing sociological theories on mating and development. Results show that net of shifts in educational distributions, mating has increased over marriage cohorts in all subregions except for Southern Africa, with increases driven mostly by rural areas. Trends in rural areas align with the status attainment hypothesis, whereas trends in urban areas are consistent with the inverted U-curve framework and the increasing applicability of the general openness hypothesis. The inequality analysis conducted through a combination of variance decomposition and counterfactual approaches reveals that mating accounts for a nonnegligible share (3% to 12%) of the cohort-specific inequality in household wealth, yet changes in mating over time hardly move time trends in wealth inequality, which is in line with findings from high-income societies.

show abstract

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Educational Assortative Matingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Educational Assortative Mating in Sub-Saharan Africa: Compositional Changes and Implications for Household Wealth Inequality

Pesando

2021

Demography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Assortment based on educational attainment may have particularly broad consequences. It could pose a societal challenge by concentrating human and economic resources 16 and could present a health challenge because genetic influences on educational attainment correlate with most health phenotypes 17 . Furthermore, educational attainment has increased massively over the last few generations 18 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling assortative mating and genetic similarities between partners, siblings, and in-laws

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Assortative mating on heritable traits can have implications for the genetic resemblance between siblings and in-laws in succeeding generations. We studied polygenic scores and phenotypic data from pairs of partners (n = 26,681), siblings (n = 2,170), siblings-in-law (n = 3,905), and co-siblings-in-law (n = 1,763) in the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study. Using structural equation models, we estimated associations between measurement error-free latent genetic and phenotypic variables. We found evidence of genetic similarity between partners for educational attainment (rg = 0.37), height (rg = 0.13), and depression (rg = 0.08). Common genetic variants associated with educational attainment correlated between siblings above 0.50 (rg = 0.68) and between siblings-in-law (rg = 0.25) and co-siblings-in-law (rg = 0.09). Indirect assortment on secondary traits accounted for partner similarity in education and depression, but not in height. Comparisons between the genetic similarities of partners and siblings indicated that genetic variances were in intergenerational equilibrium. This study shows genetic similarities between extended family members and that assortative mating has taken place for several generations.

show abstract

“…Indeed Greenwood et al (2014) document an increase in marriage market assortativity as an important source of inequality. However, it is not immediately obvious that our welfare results on sorting will carry over in that context.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pricing group membership

Bandyopadhyay¹,

Cabrales²

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We consider a model where agents differ in their 'types' which determines their voluntary contribution towards a public good. We analyze what the equilibrium composition of groups are under centralized and centralized choice. We show that there exists a top-down sorting equilibrium i.e. an equilibrium where there exists a set of prices which leads to groups that can be ordered by level of types, with the first k types in the group with the highest price and so on. This exists both under decentralized and centralized choosing. We also analyze the model with endogenous group size and examine under what conditions is top-down sorting socially efficient. We illustrate when integration (i.e. mixing types so that each group's average type if the same) is socially better than top-down sorting. Finally, we show that top down sorting is efficient even when groups compete among themselves.

show abstract

Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

Educational Assortative Mating in Sub-Saharan Africa: Compositional Changes and Implications for Household Wealth Inequality

Educational Assortative Mating in Sub-Saharan Africa: Compositional Changes and Implications for Household Wealth Inequality

Modeling assortative mating and genetic similarities between partners, siblings, and in-laws

Pricing group membership

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About