| Abstract: |
Social scientists have long been interested in marital homogamy and its
relationship with inequality. Yet, measuring homogamy is not straightforward,
particularly when we are interested in studying sorting on multiple traits. In
this paper, we compare different statistical methods that have been used in
the demographic, sociological and economic literature. We show that Separate
Extreme Value (SEV) models not only generate a matching function with several
desirable theoretical properties, but they are also particularly suited for
the study of multidimensional sorting. We use small-scale survey data to study
sorting among parents of children attending schools in Naples. Our findings
show that homogamy is pervasive: not only men and women sort on age,
education, height and physical characteristics, but they also look for
partners that share similar health-related behavioral traits and risk
attitude. We also show that marital patterns are well explained by a low
number of dimensions, the most important being human capital. Moreover,
children of parents with a high human capital endowment perform better at
school, although they report lower levels of subjective well-being and
perceived quality of relationship with their parents. |