Online dating may be partly responsible for the rise in income inequality in the United States in recent decades, according to a study. research work.
With the advent of dating apps that allow people to search for partners based on criteria like education, Americans are increasingly marrying those who are more like themselves. That explains about half of the rise in household income inequality between 1980 and 2020, researchers from the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis and Haverford College found.
Using data from the Census Bureau's American Population Survey from 2008 to 2021, when online dating quickly became popular, economists found that women became slightly more selective in choosing partners based on age, while men became slightly more selective based on education level.
But when the researchers compared that with data on couples from the 1960s and 1980s, they found that people were increasingly choosing partners with similar wages and education levels in recent years. And while many people were marrying within the same ethnic group, people were becoming less and less picky about race over time.
Who people marry has a big impact on household income. The study finds that the two biggest factors driving inequality in spouse choice are education and skills, followed to a much lesser extent by income and age, while race plays a relatively minor role, co-author Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria, an economic policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said in her report. blog post describing the article.
Overall, the prevalence of online dating apps has increased the Gini coefficient, a widely used measure of income inequality, by 3 percentage points, studies show.
“We find that much of the rise in income inequality over the past half-century is explained by sorting along vertical characteristics such as income and skills, and their interaction with education,” the economists write in their paper.