Bright and Wealthy: Exploring Assortative Mating

While current literature on marital sorting focuses either on the role of schooling or on the role of wages, we argue that both variables simultaneously determine the level of assortative mating, since schooling and wages are never perfectly correlated. Using data from the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW), with families tracked longitudinally from 1989 to 2004, we estimate a system of simultaneous mating equations for wages and schooling, along with a wage equation to model the interaction between the market for marriage and the market for labor. We find evidence that cross-effects of these variables in the mating equations play a significant role in determining the level of assortative matching.