A new method for identifying what Cupid's invisible hand is doing. Is it spreading color blindness while turning us more "picky'' about spousal education?

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to detect changes in racial homophily and economic divides in society by analyzing marital preferences and their effects on inter-racial and educationally homogamous marriages, controlling for trait distribution shifts.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel method to identify societal shifts in racial and economic preferences over generations, accounting for trait distribution changes.

Findings

Economic divide shows a U-curve from 1960 to 2010, then slightly declines.

Racial homophily has increased since 1970, indicating more permissiveness towards intermarriages.

Refutes the status-cast exchange hypothesis based on joint dynamics of economic and racial preferences.

Abstract

We develop a method suitable for detecting whether racial homophily is on the rise and also whether the economic divide (i.e., the gap between individuals with different education levels and thereby with different abilities to generate income) is growing in a society. We identify these changes with the changing aggregate marital preferences over the partners' race and education level through their effects on the share of inter-racial couples and the share of educationally homogamous couples. These shares are shaped not only by preferences, but also by the distributions of marriageable men and women by traits. The method proposed is designed to control for changes in the trait distributions from one generation to another. By applying the method, we find the economic divide in the US to display a U-curve pattern between 1960 and 2010 followed by its slightly negative trend between 2010 and 2015. The identified trend of racial homophily suggests that the American society has become more and more permissive towards racial intermarriages since 1970. Finally, we refute the aggregate version of the status-cast exchange hypothesis based on the joint dynamics of the economic divide and the racial homophily.