Code and data used in the paper: Changing Educational Homogamy: Shifting preferences or evolving educational distribution?
Description
Naszodi and Mendonca (2022) studies educational homogamy in the US and four European countries (France, Hungary, Portugal, Romania). The authors apply two methods for identifying the directly unobservable shifts in marital preferences from one generation to another. Both methods identify changes in preferences through their effects on the share of educationally homogamous couples with a counterfactual decomposition. The first method was developed by Naszodi and Mendonca (2021). It uses only aggregate census data on the equilibrium matching outcome. It is implemented in R, Excel and Visual Basic and can be downloaded from doi:10.17632/x2ry7bcm95.2 (currently available in version 2). The aggregate census data used in the benchmark analysis of the paper by Naszodi and Mendonca (2022) can be downloaded from this site (see: Changing Educational Preferences - ContingencyTables.xls). These data are aggregate census data from IPUMS on the joint educational distributions of young male and female partners/spouses in the studied five countries covering two census waves. The second method was developed in Naszodi and Mendonca (2022) and implemented in R. This method uses dating data. First, it estimates the education level-specific distributions of the reservation points of the marriageable young women and men in the population from data on the distributions of the search criteria (on the education level of the preferred partners) of a sample of dating site users. Then, the method uses the estimated reservation points distributions together with the aggregate Gale-Shapley algorithm and the census data on the joint educational distributions to construct various counterfactuals for the decompositions. The uploaded files allow one to replicate the calculations in the paper by Naszodi and Mendonca (2022) using the reservation points-based second method. Also, it allows one to apply this method in other empirical settings as well. References: Naszodi, A. and Mendonca, F. (2021) "A new method for identifying the role of marital preferences at shaping marriage patterns." Journal of Demographic Economics, 1-27. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/dem.2021.1 Naszodi A, Mendonca F (2022). Changing educational homogamy: shifting preferences or evolving educational distribution? Journal of Demographic Economics 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1017/ dem.2022.21