Educational Assortative Mating in Sub-Saharan Africa: Compositional Changes and Implications for Household Wealth Inequality

Author:

Pesando Luca Maria1

Affiliation:

1. Department of Sociology and Centre on Population Dynamics (CPD), McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada

Abstract

Abstract Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is undergoing rapid transformations in the realm of union formation in tandem with significant educational expansion and rising labor force participation rates. Concurrently, the region remains the least developed and most unequal along multiple dimensions of human and social development. In spite of this unique scenario, never has the social stratification literature examined patterns and implications of educational assortative mating for inequality in SSA. Using 126 Demographic and Health Surveys from 39 SSA countries between 1986 and 2016, this study is the first to document changing patterns of educational assortative mating by marriage cohort, subregion, and household location of residence and relate them to prevailing sociological theories on mating and development. Results show that net of shifts in educational distributions, mating has increased over marriage cohorts in all subregions except for Southern Africa, with increases driven mostly by rural areas. Trends in rural areas align with the status attainment hypothesis, whereas trends in urban areas are consistent with the inverted U-curve framework and the increasing applicability of the general openness hypothesis. The inequality analysis conducted through a combination of variance decomposition and counterfactual approaches reveals that mating accounts for a nonnegligible share (3% to 12%) of the cohort-specific inequality in household wealth, yet changes in mating over time hardly move time trends in wealth inequality, which is in line with findings from high-income societies.

Publisher

Duke University Press

Subject

Demography

Reference85 articles.

1. Household bargaining and excess fertility: An experimental study in Zambia;Ashraf;American Economic Review,2014

2. Contextual declines in educational hypergamy and intimate partner violence;Behrman;Social Forces,2019

3. Determinants of the evolution of inequality in Africa;Bigsten;Journal of African Economies,2018

Cited by 17 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. No End to Hypergamy when Considering the Full Married Population;Population and Development Review;2024-07

2. Status (in)consistency in education and violent parenting practices towards children;Social Science & Medicine;2024-06

3. Racial and ethnic variation in the relationship between parental educational similarity and infant health;Research in Social Stratification and Mobility;2024-02

4. Marital sorting, family output, and wealth inequality;Oxford Economic Papers;2023-08-10

5. Men's Self-Reported Experiences of Women's Controlling Behaviours and Intimate Partner Violence in Kenya;The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence;2023-08-02

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3