Educational assortative marriage and income inequality among Black and White families in the US, 1976-2017
Abstract
I re-assess a puzzling finding in the social stratification literature: the null effect of increasing education assortative mating on the takeoff in income inequality. The article uses more sophisticated methods than past work to unravel potentially offsetting forces driving the null-effect of assortative mating. In particular, the article allows for separate analyses for White and Black populations, recognizing that different trends and patterns of assortative mating may have different consequences for income inequality. In addition, it decomposes the overall impact of assortative mating into two components: one due to changes in the marginal distribution of education; another one due to changes in pure assortative behavior, both of which might have evolved differently over time, and by race. Finally, it examines the impact of differential selection into marriage – the married population being increasingly whiter and more educated – on the relationship between assortative mating and inequality. The results provide an exhaustive confirmation of the minor or null effect of the educational assortative mating on income inequality, ruling out some possible explanations for this finding. Results suggest that such null effect is not due to offsetting trends for Blacks and Whites; to countervailing effects of educational expansion and changing assortative behavior; to insufficiently strong changes in assortative mating and selection into marriage; or to the use of methods that are not able to detect complex patterns.