Educational Assortative Mating in sub-Saharan Africa: Compositional Changes and Implications for Household Wealth Inequality

• In Event: 2148 - Social Inequality and Stratification: Cross-national Examples

Abstract

Over the past decade there has been increasing interest in patterns of educational assortative mating across the developing world. Yet a dearth of research to date has provided a closer look at changing patterns of mating in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from 38 SSA countries between 1986 and 2015, this paper is the first to offer a comparative overview of educational homogamy in this region. The study has three aims. First, I descriptively examine whether positive assortative mating has increased over time, by country and sub-region of SSA. Second, I compare observed patterns of assortative mating with those that would prevail under random mating, and investigate the extent to which the observed trends are driven by changes in compositional – shifting educational distributions – versus other factors. Third, I adopt an accounting-based methodology to assess implications of increasing educational homogamy for household wealth inequality. Results show that positive assortative mating has increased over marriage cohort, with significant cross-country and cross-regional differences, yet time trends are heterogeneous and vary by context depending on where in the educational distribution one looks. Furthermore, I find that educational assortative mating accounts for a non-negligible share (3 to 10 per cent) of the cohort-specific inequality in household wealth.

Author

• Luca Maria Pesando, University of Pennsylvania