Online dating may be partly responsible for rising income inequality in the United States in recent decades, according to a study. Research paper.
Since the advent of dating apps that let people search for partners based on criteria including education, Americans are increasingly marrying someone more like themselves. That accounts for 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 Community Survey from 2008 to 2021, when online dating became widespread, the economists found that women became slightly more selective when choosing partners based on age, while men became slightly more selective based on education.
But when the researchers compared that to data on married couples from 1960 and 1980, they found that people in the latter period increasingly chose partners with similar incomes and education levels. And while more people married someone of the same race, people became less selective about race over time.
Who people marry has a big impact on household income. Research shows that the two leading drivers of inequality in the choice of spouse are education and skills. Income and age follow far behind, while race plays a relatively insignificant role, Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria, an economic policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said in a study published by The New York Times. Blog post Description of the paper.
Overall, the proliferation of online apps to find a future partner has led to a 3 percentage point increase in the Gini coefficient — a widely used measure of income inequality, the research shows.
“We find that the increase in income inequality over the past half-century can be largely explained by disaggregation by vertical characteristics, such as income and skill, and their interaction with education,” the economists wrote in their paper.