Inequality and Assortative Mating

Talk by Anna Naszodi (Central Bank of Hungary and International Demographic Inequality Lab) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

The talk will be based on the forthcoming book New Methods for Measuring Inequality by Analyzing Assortative Mating (Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis). The starting premise of the book it this: it is a sign of increasing overall inequality between different social groups if a generation is less permissive of their members to choose a partner outside their own educational group or racial group relative to an earlier-born generation. The book offers a comprehensive overview of indicators, methods, and models proposed in the literature for measuring the degree of sorting into couples, with the aim of identifying patterns in inequality. A unique feature of the book is that it meets some ambitious goals, e.g., to dispel common misconceptions in the literature about the direction of causal relationship between assortative mating and inequality, to challenge established conventions on their measurements, and—true to its constructive spirit—to introduce methods that perform well empirically at documenting trends in inequality between different educational groups in almost 80 countries and different racial groups in the United States.