Race, education and occupation patterns in the relationship between assortative marriage and earnings inequality for cohorts in Brazil

Danyella Brito, Cedeplar, UFMG
Ana Hermeto, Cedeplar, UFMG

The study seeks to advance and contribute to the debate in several ways: (1) investigating the extent and patterns of marital assortative mating in Brazil; (2) investigating and describing the changes in family structures in Brazil; (3) developing a framework to discuss whether, how and how changes in the patterns of assortative mating marital and family structures affect income inequality in recent decades in Brazil. The analysis exploits the potential of micro data from Brazilian household surveys from 1987 to 2013. The samples are restricted to individuals 25 to 60 years old, divided into age groups. The triennial cohorts are followed over time, in the accumulation of the cross-section surveys. Then, the implications of changes and / or permanence of the identified patterns of living arrangements and marital assortative mating in terms of the distribution of labor income and household income are assessed using a model of quantile regressions. An important question to be answered at this point is the extent to which barriers to marriage between educational groups are responsible for differences in income between these groups.