Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality in Argentina

Abstract

This paper uses the decomposition method of (Greenwood et Al, 2014) to assess the contribution of Assortative Mating to household income inequality in Argentina. For this purpose, the Gini coefficient and contingency tables for spouses’ educational attainment are estimated to simulate the outcomes of random mating. Unlike Greenwood, we do not use IPUMS data due to the lack of availability of income data in the Argentine census; we resort instead to household surveys for 21 years. We find that Assortative Mating plays a minor role in the determination of household income inequality; despite explaining about 5% of household income inequality, results have very little robustness to changes in parameters and are also at odds with values of several sorting indicators which show a very modest increase.