A new method for identifying changing marital preferences for race and education level
Year: 2021
Type: preprint
Abstract: In this paper, I generalize the Naszodi-Mendonca method in order to identify changes in marital preferences over multiple dimensions, such as the partners' race and education level. Similar to the original Naszodi-Mendonca method, preferences are identified by the generalized method through estimating their effects on marriage patterns, in particular, on the share of inter-racial couples, and the share of educationally homogamous couples. This is not a simple task because marriage patterns are shaped not only by marital preferences, but also by the distribution of marriageable males and females by traits. The generalized Naszodi-Mendonca method is designed for constructing counterfactuals to perform the decomposition. I illustrate the application of the generalized Naszodi-Mendonca method by decomposing changes in the prevalence of racial and educational homogamy in the 1980s using US data from IPUMS.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Author: Anna Naszódi
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3137373305