It is a long-standing principle in anthropology, sociology but also economics, that there are strong social and material incentives for people to marry or partner on the basis of social similarity, thus encouraging equality within partnerships but social inequality in the distribution of education, income, or other characteristics. It has been argued, however, that marriage is becoming less hom...

What explains the relative persistence of racial homogamy in romantic relationships? One possibility is structural—these patterns reflect the fact that social interactions are already stratified along racial lines—while another attributes these patterns to individual-level preferences. We present novel evidence from an online dating community involving more than 250,000 people in the United Sta...

This article studies the places where spouses met for first time in Italy. The focus is on online settings most recent marriage cohorts (2000-2009 and 2010-2016). aim to investigate trends over use of Internet as a meeting place explore whether dating can affect rules assortative mating homogamy. Information about marriages analyzed highly engaged relationships. A quantitative approach used biv...

BACKGROUND In this study we ask why spouses resemble each other in smoking behaviour and assess if such resemblance depends on period of data collection or age. Spousal similarity may reflect different, not mutually exclusive, processes. These include phenotypic assortment (choice of spouse is based on phenotype) or social homogamy at the time spouses first meet, and marital interaction during ...

This study expands existing scholarship on the relationship between parental educational similarity and infant health using rich administrative data from Chile covering births that occurred 1990 2015. We test (homogamy) or dissimilarity (heterogamy) two measures of health, namely low birth weight (LBW) preterm (PB). show homogamy is associated with a reduced probability – particularly at high e...