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Title: Educational Assortative Marriage and Earnings Inequality in the United States
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2008
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Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the impact of educational assortative marriage on the growth in earnings inequality between households in the United States between the period 1975-79 and 2001-05 using data from the March CPS. We decompose inequality between households into a within- and a between-group component. The groups are definedaccording to the educational level of the household head and his/her partner. We also include households with an unpartnered head by allowing the definition of mens andwomens education to include an absent category. Thus, unlike most previous analyses of the effects of educational homogamy on economic inequality, we also take into accounthouseholds headed by an unpartnered person. Our results suggest that changing distributions of male and female education and changing patterns of educational assortativemating have played very little role in explaining why inter-household earnings inequality increased over the period that we consider. Rather, the main causes were increasing gaps between households of different types in their average earnings, and rising inequality within households of each particular type. This is consistent with the well known story of increasing returns to education over time and increasing heterogeneity of returns within each level of education. The results, however, contradict the argument that increasing educational homogamy, of itself, will cause greater inequality between households.
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Authors: Salazar, Leire; Breen, Richard
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Institution: Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course, Department of Sociology, Yale University
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Publisher Location: New Haven, CT
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Family and Marriage, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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