Nakosteen, Robert A., Olle Westerlund, and Michael A. Zimmer. 2004. "Marital Matching and Earnings: Evidence from the Unmarried Population in Sweden." Journal of Human Resources 39(4): 1033-1044.

Social scientists have devoted substantial research to economic basis for matching of men and women in marriage. A common feature of existing studies is their reliance on samples of married couples. The principal shortcoming of spouse data is that spouses’ earnings correlations are contaminated by the partners’ behaviors and other events that occur after marriage and affect their earnings. This study addresses that problem by exploiting a longitudinal data file from the Swedish population. By selecting a sample of married couples in a given year, we retreat through the file to years before the marriage. Using data from the spouses’ single years, we apply the correlation methodology to their earnings. Evidence from the model supports positive assortative mating.

Robert A. Nakosteen is an associate professor in the School of Management, University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Olle Westerlund is an associate Professor in the Economics Department, University of Umeå, Sweden. Michael A. Zimmer is Bristol Myers Squibb Professor of Economics, University of Evansville, Indiana. We wish to thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2002 conference of the Missouri Valley Economic Association. The data used in this article are proprietary and derived from Swedish tax and labor market records. The authors will provide information regarding obtaining the data from Statistics Sweden and The Swedish Labour Market Board.