Full Citation
Title: The Role of Evolving Marital Preferences in Growing Income Inequality
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2019
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Abstract: In this paper, we describe mating patterns in the United States from 1964 to 2017 and measure the impact of changes in marital preferences on between-household income inequality. We rely on the recent literature on the econometrics of matching models to estimate complementarity parameters of the household production function. Our structural approach allows to measure sorting on multiple dimensions and to effectively disentangle changes in marital preferences and in demographics, addressing concerns that affect results from existing literature. We answer the following questions: has assortativeness increased over time? Along which dimensions? To which extent the shifts in marital preferences can explain inequality trends? We find that, after controlling for other observables, assortative mating on education has become stronger. Moreover, if mating patterns had not changed since 1971, the 2017 Gini coefficient between married households would be lower by 6%. We conclude that about 25% of the increase in between-household inequality is due to changes in marital preferences. Increased assortativeness on education positively contributes to the inequality rise, but only modestly.
Url: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2712524
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Authors: Ciscato, Edoardo; Weber, Simon
Publisher: Sciences Po Paris
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Family and Marriage, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other
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