Eventi del

10 2018 12:30
Sala Riunioni 5.e4.sr04 - Via Roentgen 1

Understanding Marital Sorting Among the College Educated

Edwin Leuven (University of Oslo)

Abstract

A large literature documents that individuals tend to sort into marriages with people who attained similar levels of schooling. Assortative mating is even stronger by type of college education than by education level. Little is known about why these observed mating patterns by schooling arise. They may occur because of preferences for spousal education, or preferences for traits correlated with education. Assortativeness may also arise because of opportunities rather than preferences. This paper investigates how the choice of education affects whether and who to marry, and why college graduates tend to marry spouses with the same type of education. Our setting is Norway’s post-secondary education system where a centralized admission process creates discontinuities into different fields and institutions which allows us to implement a fuzzy RD design that tackles selection into schooling. We find that educational choices matter substantially for marital sorting among college educated. Matching effects are local to institution, and having overlapped at college. We also find that the effects on marrying someone with the same education depend on idiosyncratic variation in program-specific sex-ratio. These findings point to the importance of frictions in the marriage market of college educated.