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  5. Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class

American Economic Review

ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)

Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class

  • Benjamin Goldman
  • Jamie Gracie
  • Sonya R. Porter
American Economic Review (Forthcoming)

Abstract

Americans rarely marry outside their race or class group, a pattern with well-documented implications for inequality and intergenerational mobility. Limited exposure may partly explain these low intergroup marriage rates. We instrument for exposure using variation in childhood neighborhoods based on whether other race and class groups had more opposite-sex children of similar age. Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent-income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (White and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage model predicts that residential segregation—one of many forms of exposure—accounts for more than one third of marital sorting by class but less than 5 percent by race.

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