Educational Assortative Mating in Marriages and Consensual Unions in Latin America, 1970-2000

Luis A. Lopez, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Teresa Castro Martin, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)

This paper aims at exploring the differences in assortative mating between marriages and consensual unions in Latin America. We focus on eight countries in the region and compare the situation between 1970 and 2000. The countries under study are: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Panama. We use national representative samples of couples (spouses aged 25-39) drawn from the integrated census microdata samples available at the IPUMS-International database. We apply log-linear analysis to control for the educational attainment of spouses and to investigate if there are differences in patterns of educational homogamy by union type. In general, our findings suggest that both unions share the same pattern of educational homogamy. In this sense, our results are similar to those obtained by Blackwell and Lichter (2004) for the U.S. case.