Educational Assortative Mating and Mexican Immigrant Families

Dafeng Xu, Cornell University

This paper studies the pattern of educational assortative mating among Mexican families. We employ fixed effects models to analyze the relationship between men's education and the within-family gender difference in education. Generally, Mexican men with less than six years of education tend to marry women with relatively more education, and Mexican men with more than six years of education tend to marry women with relatively less education. While this general mating pattern is discussed, we put a special focus on families migrating to the U.S. We find that Mexican migrant families have a ``numerically'' different mating pattern: compared with non-migrant families staying in Mexico, the within-family gender difference in education is relatively larger in a migrant family in which the husband receives less than six years of education, but is relatively smaller in a migrant family in which the husband receives more than six years of education.