TY - RPRT AU - Dupuy, Arnaud AU - Weber, Simon TI - Marital Patterns and Income Inequality PY - 2018/May/ PB - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) CY - Bonn T2 - IZA Discussion Paper IS - 11572 UR - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp11572 AB - We investigate the role of marital patterns in explaining rising income inequality using a structural marriage matching model with unobserved heterogeneity. This allows us to consider both the extensive and intensive margins of the marriage market, i.e. who remains single and who marries whom. Using US data from 1962 to 2017, we show that marital patterns can explain about 1/3 of the rise in income inequality. The intensive margin (educational assortative mating) has only played a minor role (5%), the extensive margin being the main driver of the contribution of marital patterns (95%). KW - marriage market KW - matching KW - singles KW - assortative mating ER -