A number of previous studies have documented a fairly high level of marital homogamy in Norway. Most of these studies, however, have been local and ethnographic, or based on national data measuring homogamy within a limited time period. This study is based on a sample of 129 651 individuals from the 1980 Census. From this data bank, a sample of couples is constructed. Patterns of educational ho...

The explosive expansion of non-marital cohabitation in Latin America since the 1970s has led to the narrowing of the gap in educational homogamy between married and cohabiting couples (what we call "homogamy gap") as shown by our analysis of 29 census samples encompassing eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Panama (N = 2,295,160 young couples). M...

Assortative mating based on education is a common phenomenon. We investigated whether it affected parameters of reproductive performance such as childlessness, offspring number and age at first marriage. On the basis of the US census from 1980 (n = 670,631 married US couples), we find that the proportion of childless individuals is usually minimal in women married to a husband of the same educa...

Sociologists are inclined to predict that increases in homogamy may increase inequality among families, but the existing literature is short on such empirical evidence. Using quantile regression, which allows us to detect if effects of income determinants may vary across different economic strata, we examine whether, how, and to what extent “like marrying like” may lead to the increased inequal...

This paper considers how the rise of remarriage and premarital cohabitation affect the trends and patterns of educational homogamy in Britain. Using repeated cross-sectional data taken from the General Household Surveys, which cover a thirty years period, I show that the strength of educational homogamy has declined for remarriages and for marriages that began as cohabiting unions. The decline ...

BACKGROUND Resemblance between spouses can be due to phenotypic assortment, social homogamy and/or marital interaction. A significant degree of assortment can have consequences for the genetic architecture of a population. We examined the existence and cause(s) of assortment for obsessive-compulsive (OC), anxious and depressive symptoms in a population-based twin-family sample. METHOD OC, anx...

There is considerable disagreement about whether cohabitors are more or less likely to be educationally homogamous than married couples. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I reconcile many of the disparate findings of previous research by conducting a "stock and flow" analysis of assortative cohabitation and marriage. I find that cohabitors are less likely to be educatio...

This paper reports on a study of trends in marital age homogamy in China from 1960 to 2005 that uses data from the China 2005 1% Population Inter-census Survey. Instead of a consistent increase in age homogamy, results show an inverted U-shaped trend. One plausible explanation is that intensified economic pressure, rising consumerism, and a shrinking gender gap in education during the post-1990...