Thread by @sanderwagner

Our do rich kids marry each other paper? We look at couple formation based on parental wealth in 🇩🇰 and find
1) it is much lower than in previous work on US
2) it is getting stronger over time
potentially strengthening effects of parntering on inequality osf.io/preprints/soca…

the paper is written together with my amazing co-authors @DBoertien and Mette Gortz, who is so awesome she does not need a twitter account.

We look at parents wealth (which we get exactly for almost every kid from the national registry data) from 1987 to 2013. Here you can see the parents assets depending into which wealth percentile they fall and the development of mean wealth of parents over time

Here is a heatmap, showing how likely kids from different parental wealth backgrounds are to form couples. See that red dot up right? That's kids from the 1 percent marrying amongst each other a lot. Also note they avoid marrying below the 40th percentile.

Here you can see how homogamy by parental wealth in Denmark evolved from 1987 to 2013 giphy.com/gifs/64anFirdC…

This makes the trends even clearer. The graph shows the correlation between parental wealth of couples formed in DK between 87 and 2013 (measured in different ways) All three measures go up since the 90s with a drop after the GFC

Why does it matter?
1) to see how social boundaries between groups are drawn, they seem to be increasing wrt wealth background
2) for inequality reproduction. eg @BrankoMilan argues in his book that increasing homogamy drives increasing inequality, this seems in line with that.