Department of Sociology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Demography. 2012 Aug;49(3):867-87. doi: 10.1007/s13524-012-0111-2.
Many writers have expressed a concern that growing educational assortative mating will lead to greater inequality between households in their earnings or income. In this article, we examine the relationship between educational assortative mating and income inequality in Denmark between 1987 and 2006. Denmark is widely known for its low level of income inequality, but the Danish case provides a good test of the relationship between educational assortative mating and inequality because although income inequality increased over the period we consider, educational homogamy declined. Using register data on the exact incomes of the whole population, we find that change in assortative mating increased income inequality but that these changes were driven by changes in the educational distributions of men and women rather than in the propensity for people to choose a partner with a given level of education.
许多作家都表示担心，教育选择性婚配的增加将导致家庭收入或收入差距加大。在本文中，我们考察了 1987 年至 2006 年期间丹麦教育选择性婚配与收入不平等之间的关系。丹麦以其收入不平等程度低而闻名，但丹麦的情况很好地检验了教育选择性婚配与不平等之间的关系，因为尽管在此期间收入不平等有所增加，但教育同型婚配却有所减少。我们利用关于整个人口确切收入的登记数据发现，婚配选择性的变化增加了收入不平等，但这些变化是由男女教育分布的变化而不是人们选择具有特定教育水平的伴侣的倾向所驱动的。
