Express 01: Educational Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality

This is a NBER working paper in July 2014. Using data from the U.S. and Norway over 1980-2007, the authors find evidence of positive assortative mating at all levels of education. The density is declining among high educated but increasing among the low educated. Furthermore, they find that educational assortative mating contributes significantly to the cross-sectional inequality in household income. The negative effect on the trend of inequality by declining high educated matching is offset by increasing low educated matching.
Comment: Em, is educational assortative mating the fairest causal factor for inequality?
Authors: Lasse Eika, Magne Mogstad, Basit Zafar 
Link: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20271