Genetic and educational assortative mating among US adults

Genetic and educational assortative mating among US adults.

Understanding the social and biological mechanisms that lead to homogamy (similar individuals marrying one another) has been a long-standing issue across many fields of scientific inquiry. Using a nationally representative sample of non-Hispanic white US adults from the Health and Retirement Study and information from 1.7 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms, we compare genetic similarity am...

Educational Assortative Mating in Two Generations:

Assortative Mating on Education: A Genetic Assessment∗

We combine an instrumental variables approach –exploiting genetic variation in polygenic scores and controlling for population stratification– with a stochastic linear bi-dimensional matching model –which allows us to test the validity of the exclusion restriction. Individuals match on an additive index of overall marital attractiveness which has two components: an observable component (educati...

Patterns of racial and educational assortative mating in Brazil.

Exchange of racial for educational status has been documented for black/white marriages in the United States. Exchange may be an idiosyncratic feature of U.S. society, resulting from unusually strong racial boundaries historically developed there. We examine status exchange across racial lines in Brazil. In contrast to the United States, Brazil features greater fluidity of racial boundaries and...

Assortative mating without assortative preference.

Assortative mating--marriage of a man and a woman with similar social characteristics--is a commonly observed phenomenon. In the existing literature in both sociology and economics, this phenomenon has mainly been attributed to individuals' conscious preferences for assortative mating. In this paper, we show that patterns of assortative mating may arise from another structural source even if in...