Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
教育同类婚配的趋势与结构
Trends and structure of educational assortative mating
摘要
I study the structure and evolution of educational assortative mating in the U.S. using 1962–2025 Current Population Survey data. From observed marital patterns, I recover the full matrix of marital gains across educational groups within the equilibrium matching framework of Choo and Siow (2006) and provide a novel characterization of its complementarity structure using Singular Value Decomposition. This approach allows me to infer the number of relevant sorting dimensions, to describe how different educational attainments are valued along each dimension, and to develop aggregate measures of assortative mating based on local odds ratios. I show that the first dimension explains more than 90% of total sorting in all periods and ranks individuals monotonically by educational attainment, consistent with the presence of human capital complementarities à la Becker. However, higher-order dimensions capture homogamous preferences that help explain the prevalence of same-education couples in the data. I document evidence of a long-run increase in educational assortative mating, with a marked slowdown since the 1990s, although the magnitude of the long-run increase is sensitive to how educational categories are defined, partly due to a coding change in the CPS educational variable in 1992. I also show that high-school dropouts have become increasingly isolated, college and postgraduate groups have converged, and gender asymmetries in returns from sorting have declined.
中文摘要
我利用1962—2025年当期人口调查数据，研究美国教育同类婚配的结构与演变。基于观察到的婚姻模式，我在Choo和Siow（2006）的均衡匹配框架内，复原了各教育群体之间婚姻收益的完整矩阵，并利用奇异值分解对其互补性结构给出了一种新的刻画。该方法使我能够推断相关排序维度的数量，描述不同教育程度在各维度上如何被评价，并基于局部优势比构建同类婚配的总体度量。我发现，第一个维度在所有时期都能解释总排序的90%以上，并按教育程度对个体进行单调排序，这与Becker式人力资本互补性的存在相一致。然而，更高阶维度捕捉到了同质婚配偏好，这有助于解释数据中同教育程度配偶的普遍存在。我记录了教育同类婚配长期上升的证据，且自1990年代以来明显放缓，不过长期上升的幅度对教育类别如何界定较为敏感，部分原因是1992年CPS教育变量的编码变化。我还表明，高中辍学者日益被隔离，大学与研究生群体已经趋同，并且排序收益中的性别不对称已经下降。