Research Seminar «Educational assortative mating and its impact on income inequality in Russia»

Speaker: Daria Zinchenko, PhD Student at HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences.

Theme: Educational assortative mating and its impact on income inequality in Russia.

This study is a follow-up to the paper [Zinchenko, Lukyanova, 2018] that analyzes educational assortative mating and its impact on income inequality in Russia for 1995 – 2015. The estimates of assortative mating are based on sorting parameter adjusted for the ages of the spouses and secular trends in educational attainment. I find that the overall degree of assortative mating remained almost unchanged over the past few decades. The lack of pronounced trend may be explained by offsetting dynamics of sorting parameters within educational sub-groups. Among college graduates assortative mating has been declining, whereas it has increased among the low educated.

I estimate the contribution of educational assortative mating to household income inequality by comparing the levels of actual and counterfactual inequality. The counterfactual scenario assumes the marriage patterns are random in terms of education. Analysis shows that educational assortative mating has low impact (no more than 4%) on the distribution of household incomes. I also examine whether the changes in educational composition and assortative mating contributed to changes in income inequality. I fix the distribution of one factor at a base year 1995 allowing the other factors to vary over time. Preliminary calculations indicate that both factors have weak influence on the time trend in household income inequality. Their impact did not exceed 0.2% и 1.7% respectively.