Abstract
AbstractThe extent to which like‐with‐like marry is important for inequality as well as for the outcomes of children who result from the union. In this paper, we present evidence on changes in assortative mating and its implications for household inequality in the UK. Our approach contrasts with others in the literature in that it is consistent with an underlying model of the marriage market. We argue that a key advantage of this approach is that it creates a direct connection between changes in assortativeness in marriage and changes in the value of marriage for the various possible matches by education group. Our empirical results do not show a clear direction of change in assortativeness in the UK between the birth cohorts of 1945–54 and 1965–74. We find that changes in assortativeness pushed income inequality up slightly, but that the strong changes in education attainment across the two cohorts contributed to scale down inequality.
Highlights
Over the past 40 years inequality has been rising in the US, the UK and other developed countries
Becker (1981) had noted that if partners specialize in different activities such as housework and labor market work there will be a tendency toward negative sorting, where one partner is better educated and works in the paid labor market while the other has a lower skill level as required by housework
Most studies use US data, and some find evidence of increase in assortativeness by education and earnings capacity (Chiappori et al, 2017; Greenwood et al, 2014b) while others find that assortativeness changed differentially across the distribution of education and declined at the top (Eika et al, 2019)
Summary
Over the past 40 years inequality has been rising in the US, the UK and other developed countries. The problem is relatively easy when the proportions of people obtaining each level of education do not vary over the time period we are making the comparison When these proportions change, things become hard, because one must disentangle the mechanical effects of these changes from possible structural variations in the underlying values and benefits. We analyse changes in sorting in the marriage market in the UK For this purpose, we use an index derived by Chiappori et al (2019), which in turn is based on the model of Choo and Siow (2006) to study changes in sorting in the UK and the roles of marital matching and education attainment in driving changes in earnings inequality
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