Educational Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality: Evidence from Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa
Summary
Ana Kujundzic's Working Paper 2/2026 for Eesti Pank examines educational assortative mating and its relationship to household income inequality in four emerging economies: Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa. The paper introduces a new methodological approach that overcomes limitations of standard sorting measures and allows identification of pure sorting trends. Findings indicate that people in these countries tend to sort into internally homogeneous marriages based on education level, and while educational sorting has a noticeable impact on income inequality in any given year, changes in sorting over time barely impact inequality overall due to opposing dynamics between education groups.
“The inequality-decreasing impact from reduced sorting among the highly educated is almost entirely offset by the inequality-increasing impact from increased sorting among the least educated.”
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This working paper presents new empirical research on the relationship between educational assortative mating and household income inequality in four emerging economies. The paper introduces a methodological approach to identify pure sorting trends without imposing restrictive assumptions about the sorting process. The key empirical finding is that while people in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa sort into educationally homogeneous marriages, changes in sorting over time have minimal net impact on inequality due to offsetting dynamics between groups. The inequality-decreasing effect from reduced sorting among the highly educated is nearly counterbalanced by increased sorting among the least educated. The paper contributes to the economic literature on household income distribution and provides a new empirical approach for future research on sorting patterns.
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2/2026 Ana Kujundzic. Educational Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality: Evidence from Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa
Working Papers of Eesti Pank 2/2026
This paper presents new empirical evidence from four emerging economies on the relationship between educational assortative mating and household income inequality. It also introduces a new methodological approach, first proposed in my earlier work, that overcomes limitations of standard sorting measures used in the literature and allows for the identification of pure sorting trends without imposing restrictive assumptions about the sorting process. I find that people in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa tend to sort into internally homogeneous marriages based on education level. While educational sorting has a noticeable impact on household income inequality in any given year, changes in the degree of sorting over time barely have any impact on inequality. Further analysis reveals that this counterintuitive result is due to different dynamics within educational groups. The inequality-decreasing impact from reduced sorting among the highly educated is almost entirely offset by the inequality-increasing impact from increased sorting among the least educated. While it is certainly reassuring that concerns about educational assortative mating having a potentially large effect on income disparities between households appear to be unwarranted, these findings suggest another concerning narrative. Marginalization processes are occurring at low levels of educational distribution. The least educated are being left behind, facing limited labor market opportunities and diminished chances of achieving upward socioeconomic mobility through marriage to more educated partners.
JEL Codes: D31, I24, J12
Keywords: assortative mating, sorting, education, marriage, household income inequality
DOI: 10.23656/25045520/022026/0229
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of Eesti Pank or the Eurosystem.
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