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Recent decades have seen major changes in the educational profiles of the populations of Western industrialised countries, notably a sharp rise in educational attainment and a reversal of the gender gap in education. These trends are likely to have affected patterns of educational assortative mating and its consequences. In this editorial, we first review the empirical evidence on educational assortative mating patterns over the last two decades. Specifically, we examine whether educational homogamy has increased among the highly educated, whether women are now less likely to marry upward across cohorts, and whether the rates of relative educational homogamy in populations have increased. We also examine the factors that explain trends and cross-country differences in educational homogamy. Second, we review the consequences of educational homogamy for several important social outcomes, in particular partnership stability and union dissolution, fertility, and children’s educational attainment. Is educational homogamy increasingly affecting these outcomes, and if so, in what ways and why? Third, we identify research gaps regarding educational assortative mating and its consequences. The six empirical studies in this special issue attempt to fill some of these gaps. We briefly outline these studies and their main findings and point to implications for future research. * This editorial has been peer reviewed.

Although men tended to receive more education than women in the past, the gender gap in education has reversed in recent decades in most Western and many non-Western countries. We review the literature about the implications for union formation, assortative mating, the division of paid and unpaid work, and union stability in Western countries. The bulk of the evidence points to a narrowing of gender differences in mate preferences and declining aversion to female status-dominant relationships. Couples in which wives have more education than their husbands now outnumber those in which husbands have more. Although such marriages were more unstable in the past, existing studies indicate that this is no longer true. In addition, recent studies show less evidence of gender display in housework when wives have higher status than their husbands. Despite these shifts, other research documents the continuing influence of the breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage.

We use data from Denmark, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States to document the degree of educational assortative mating, how it evolves over time, and the extent to which it differs between countries. This descriptive analysis motivates and guides a decomposition analysis in which we quantify the contribution of various factors to the distribution of household income. We find that assortative mating accounts for a nonnegligible part of the cross-sectional inequality in household income in each country. However, changes in assortative mating over time barely move the time trends in household income inequality.

A key phenomenon to gauge the degree of ethnoracial integration is the pattern of assortative mating based on ethnoracial characteristics. However, possibly because of the assumption that class and not race is the relevant factor in the Mexican stratification regime, assortative mating based on ethnoracial characteristics has been an understudied phenomenon in the country. Based on a multidimensional perspective and using a novel national representative survey, we analyze ethnoracial homogamy patterns in Mexico using four dimensions: skin tone, ethnoracial identification, indigenous language, and Mayan surname. For comparative purposes, we also calculate and control for educational homogamy in our analysis. Results indicate that ethnoracial homogamy is significantly different to educational homogamy and that it differs among dimensions: the highest likelihood of ethnoracial homogamy is found in the linguistic dimension and the lowest in the skin tone dimension. Comparatively, ethnoracial identification and Mayan surname have intermediate levels of homogamy.

I introduce a model of undirected dyadic link formation which allows for assortative matching on observed agent characteristics (homophily) as well as unrestricted agent-level heterogeneity in link surplus (degree heterogeneity). Like in fixed effects panel data analyses, the joint distribution of observed and unobserved agent-level characteristics is left unrestricted. Two estimators for the (common) homophily parameter, β₀, are developed and their properties studied under an asymptotic sequence involving a single network growing large. The first, tetrad logit (TL), estimator conditions on a sufficient statistic for the degree heterogeneity. The second, joint maximum likelihood (JML), estimator treats the degree heterogeneity $\\left\\{ {{A_{i0}}} \\right\\}_{i = 1}^N$ as additional (incidental) parameters to be estimated. The TL estimate is consistent under both sparse and dense graph sequences, whereas consistency of the JML estimate is shown only under dense graph sequences.

The growing economic resemblance of spouses has contributed to rising inequality by increasing the number of couples in which there are two high- or two low-earning partners. The dominant explanation for this trend is increased assortative mating. Previous research has primarily relied on cross-sectional data and thus has been unable to disentangle changes in assortative mating from changes in the division of spouses' paid labor—a potentially key mechanism given the dramatic rise in wives' labor supply. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to decompose the increase in the correlation between spouses' earnings and its contribution to inequality between 1970 and 2013 into parts due to (a) changes in assortative mating, and (b) changes in the division of paid labor. Contrary to what has often been assumed, the rise of economic homogamy and its contribution to inequality is largely attributable to changes in the division of paid labor rather than changes in sorting on earnings or earnings potential. Our findings indicate that the rise of economic homogamy cannot be explained by hypotheses centered on meeting and matching opportunities, and they show where in this process inequality is generated and where it is not.

Toward understanding assortative matching, this is a self-contained introduction to research on search and matching. We first explore the nontransferable and perfectly transferable utility matching paradigms, and then a unifying imperfectly transferable utility matching model. Motivated by some unrealistic predictions of frictionless matching, we flesh out the foundational economics of search theory. We then revisit the original matching paradigms with search frictions. We finally allow informational frictions that often arise, such as in college-student sorting.

The growing economic similarity of spouses has contributed to rising income inequality across house holds. Explanations have typically centered on assortative mating, but recent work has argued that changes in women’s employment and spouses’ division of paid work have played a more important role. We expand this work to consider the critical turning point of parenthood in shaping couples’ division of employment and earnings. Drawing on three U.S. nationally representative surveys, we examine the role of parenthood in spouses’ earnings correlations between 1968 and 2015. We exam ine the extent to which changes in spouses’ earnings correlations are due to (1) changes upon entry into marriage (assortative mating), (2) changes between marriage and parenthood, (3) changes following parenthood, and (4) changes in women’s employment. Our findings show that increases in the correlation between spouses’ earnings prior to 1990 came largely from changes between marriage and first birth, but increases after 1990 came almost entirely from changes following parenthood. In both instances, changes in women’s employment are key to increasing earnings correlations. Changes in assortative mating played little role in either period. An assessment of the aggregate-level implications points to the growing significance of earnings similarity after parenthood for rising income inequality across families.

We construct a model of household decision-making in which agents consume a private and a public good, interpreted as children's welfare. Children's utility depends on their human capital, which depends on the time their parents spend with them and on the parents' human capital. We first show that as returns to human capital increase, couples at the top of the income distribution should spend more time with their children. This in turn should reinforce assortative matching, in a sense that we precisely define. We then embed the model into a transferable utility matching framework with random preferences, à la Choo and Siow (2006), which we estimate using US marriage data for individuals born between 1943 and 1972. We find that the preference for partners of the same education has significantly increased for white individuals, particularly for the highly educated. We find no evidence of such an increase for black individuals. Moreover, in line with theoretical predictions, we find that the \"marital college-plus premium\" has increasedfor women but not for men.

The extent of educational homogamy has important consequences for social inequalities and social cohesion. However, little is known about current trends, cross-national differences, and the drivers of educational homogamy in Europe. This study aims to fill this gap by (a) describing trends in absolute educational homogamy (i.e., the share of similarly educated partners) and relative educational homogamy (i.e., homogamy corrected for the distribution of spouses’ education) for European countries; and (b) examining the association between a population’s educational composition and the level of absolute and relative educational homogamy. Given the large changes in the educational composition of European populations and the presumed consequences for absolute and relative educational homogamy, this focus on educational composition is warranted. Our aggregate-level regression analyses covering 36 countries and five birth cohorts (1940-1989) from the European Social Survey show that absolute and relative educational homogamy has not changed. However, this obscures variation by education group and country. We find that the extent of absolute educational homogamy in a country cohort is strongly associated with educational composition and observe statistical effects of educational expansion (positive for the higher educated), educational heterogeneity (negative), educational gender symmetry (positive), educational income inequality (positive), and educational reproduction (positive). Relative educational homogamy is only weakly associated with a population’s educational composition, and its effects are confined to gender symmetry (positive) and educational reproduction (positive). Our findings suggest that changes in educational composition in Europe affect educational homogamy in various directions and indicate that these effects come from structural opportunities rather than changing preferences for educational homogamy. * This article belongs to a special issue on “Changes in Educational Homogamy and Its Consequences”.