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IZA Discussion Paper No. 17956
June 2025
Sorting in the Marriage Market: A New Approach to Measuring Assortative Mating
Jeongwon Choi, Jinyoung Kim

This paper introduces a new framework for measuring the extent of positive assortative mating (PAM) in the marriage market by relaxing the standard assumption of dichotomous sorting levels. Conventional PAM measures treat marriage sorting as a binary outcome—either perfectly matched or not—thereby failing to capture degrees of similarity between partner types. We propose a continuous measure of sorting based on trait similarity, where individuals are hypothesized to select mates according to the relative closeness of traits, which influences marital payoffs. Trait similarity is quantified using multidimensional attribute data and incorporated into a similarity-weighted matching matrix. We adapt conventional PAM indices—including the normalized trace, aggregate likelihood ratio, and perfect-random normalization—to this similarity-weighted framework. Applying our method to U.S. data on occupational, religious, and educational matching, we uncover patterns in assortative mating that are obscured under traditional approaches.

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Mark Fallak
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+352 585-855-526
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Olga Nottmeyer
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+352 585-855-501
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Christina Gathmann
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The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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