A collective marriage matching model is estimated and calibrated to quantify the share of returns to schooling that is realized through marriage. The predictions of the model are matched with detailed Danish household data on the relationship between schooling and wage rates, the division of time and goods within the household, and the extent to which men and women sort positively on several traits in marriage. Counterfactual analysis conducted with the model suggests that Danish men and women are earning on the order of half of their returns to schooling through improved marital outcomes.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. I find this more plausible than the signaling model. Assortative mating is one of the four forces I will discuss in my St. Louis talk. Fifty years ago, my guess is that the majority of men who were in the top 30 percent of the earnings distribution were married to women without a college education. Today, my guess is that only a small minority of men in the top 30 percent of the earnings distribution would be married to a woman without a college education. What the Danish study suggests is that if people married randomly with respect to education that would greatly reduce income inequality.
This line of study can be run farther back – when only say 35% of men finished high school, how many of their wives had finished? We might expect a premium to HS+HS over HS+NHS, for example. One imagines the ranking:
College+College
College+HS
HS+HS
HS+Nhs
….
If that holds, then we might expect the economic influence of assortive mating to have been growing in the US for something like 2 centuries.
So, you are saying that Sun Myung Moon was the greatest equalizer of the 20th century?