The Impact Of Educational Assortative Mating On Individual And Family Income

As one of the indicators to measure the degree of social openness,assortative mating has always been the focus of labor economics.Assortative mating involves multiple dimensions such as educational matching,social status matching,and family background matching of both spouses.Among them,the number of empirical research literatures on the theme of educational assortative mating is relatively small.However,previous studies have mostly explored the impact of educational assortative mating on the quality and stability of marriage,there is not enough discussion on another issue related to educational assortative mating,that is,"the consequences and social impact of education matching".According to the theory of human capital,the education of both spouses has a spillover effect on each other.If the individual’s spouse has a high level of education,then the individual will obtain a positive influence from his spouse through advice、consultation、emotional care and other channels,including the increase of knowledge reserves,the extension of interpersonal networks,and the accumulation of social resources.In addition to the spillover effect,there is also a matching effect.The education mismatch of marriage will reduce the individual’s income,that is,if the education level of the individual and the spouse do not match,even if the individual chooses to match the education upwards,the individual’s income will not be increased because of the higher education level of the spouse.Therefore,the question that this article wants to study is as follows: whether the educational assortative mating has a spillover effect on personal and family income or a matching effect,and whether this effect has gender differences.And because the problem of educational assortative mating is endogeneous,for example,it is because individuals have other advantages that make it easier to complete the behavior of upward matching of education,while individuals who achieve downward matching of education have obvious disadvantages.Therefore,this article uses the 2017 China Household Finance Survey(CHFS)data and uses the propensity score matching(PSM)method to estimate the processing effect of educational assortative mating on personal and family income.The main findings of the study are as follows: First,the proportion of couples with matching education on both sides is steadily increasing,and individuals with different levels of education have different educational matching tendencies.The specific performance is: the higher the level of education,the more preferred marriages that match the education..Second,upward matching has a small spillover effect,but as the individual’s education level increases,this effect has changed,and the matching effect has taken the lead.Third,the spillover effect of the female group is slightly greater than that of the male group.Fourth,the income of families that do not match the education of husband and wife is significantly lower than that of families that match the education of husband and wife.This will widen the income gap between families and increase economic inequality.Based on the theoretical analysis and empirical results of this article,the following policy recommendations are put forward for the discussion of educational assortative mating on personal and family income: First,increase the popularization of high school and above education to reduce the income gap caused by education gap.Second,provide appropriate skills training for families with lower education levels to enhance their bargaining power in the labor market,so as to obtain additional economic returns to narrow the income gap with higher-educated families.Third,tax is levied on a family basis,and a "family income tax" system should be established,embodying the principle of "paying taxes according to the amount".Fourth,strengthen the social security system,weaken the dependence of individual income on family background,and advocate a diversified view of marriage.