Travail de recherche/Working paper
| Résumé : | When did marriage become strongly assortative? Is it a recent development, aconsequence of increased female employment and a cause of rising inequality? A longrun perspective is necessary to answer this question. This paper uses a uniquely suitabledatabase from Quebec 1800{1970 to provide such a perspective. First, it develops anovel method which reveals that marriage was highly assortative as far back as the earlynineteenth century. Next, it shows this matching depended on the individual humancapital of women, not just on family backgrounds. Finally, it shows that mothers hada causal impact on child outcomes independently from fathers. Thus, despite deeplyconservative gender norms, marriage matching |
