Assortitave mating and inequality

The project participants analyse how spouses sort in terms of productive abilities. The analysis exploits rich data with information on both cognitive and non-cognitive skills from the military enlistment and information on income from tax reports. The researchers have developed methods to derive data on the skills of women based on the abilities of their brothers.

The extent to which sorting has changed over time is analysed; i.e. whether spouses have become more alike, as well as the consequences for the equality of opportunities across families. This has important implications since it points at important tradeoffs between ambitions for gender equality and giving everyone equal life chances in terms of education and income.