Code for "A NEW METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING THE ROLE OF MARITAL PREFERENCES AT SHAPING MARRIAGE PATTERNS"
Description
Naszodi, Anna and Francisco Mendonca (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 and Mendonca (2021) develop a new method for transforming contingency tables. The transformation preserves the Liu-Lu matrix of the table while making the marginal distributions equal to their target marginals. This transformation is essential for counterfactual decompositions where assortativity in marital preferences is assumed to be characterized by the measure proposed by Liu and Lu (2006) for dichotomous assorted trait variables, or by the generalized Liu-Lu matrix (developed by Naszodi and Mendonca for polytomous ordered assorted trait variables). Naszodi and Mendonca (2021) illustrate the application of the new method by a counterfactual decomposition. They decompose changes in the prevalence of homogamy in the US between 1980 and 2010. The uploaded files allow one to replicate all the calculations in the paper and to apply the new method in other empirical settings as well. The method is suitable for analyzing marital sorting along a polytomous ordered trait variables (such as the highest level of educational attainment, or income bracket), but also for analyzing inter-generational mobility. The new method is implemented in Excel, Visual Basic, and R.