Educational Ambition, Marital Sorting, and Inequality
This paper revisits the link between education-based marriage market sorting and income inequality. Leveraging Danish administrative data, we develop a novel categorization of “ambition types” that is based on starting wages and wage growth trajectories associated with detailed educational programs. We find a substantial increase in assortative matching by educational ambition over time, and the marriage market explains more than 40% of increasing inequality since 1980. In contrast, sorting trends are flat with the commonly-used educational level categorization. We conclude that the mapping from education to types matters crucially for conclusions about how education-based marriage market sorting contributes to rising income inequality.
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