A rank-based measure of educational assortative mating

Measures of educational assortative mating must contend with the fact that the marginal distributions of education differ by sex and change over time. I propose a new measure of assortative mating, which is based on Spearman's rank correlation coefficient but instead uses sex-by-birth cohort education ranks. I show that this adjusted measure is more robust than other measures to changes over time in the underlying education distributions.

Automated summary

Measures of educational assortative mating need to address the differences in educational distributions by gender and changes over time. A new measure based on Spearman's rank correlation coefficient using sex-by-birth cohort education ranks is proposed, showing greater robustness to changes in underlying education distributions over time.