Online dating contributes to income inequality

Since the advent of dating apps that allow people to search for a partner based on criteria, including education, Americans have increasingly married someone like themselves. That accounts for about half of the increase in household income inequality between 1980 and 2020, researchers at the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis and Haverford College.

Using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from 2008 to 2021, when online dating quickly became widespread, the economists found that women became slightly more selective when choosing their partners based on age, while men became slightly more selective based on education.

But when the researchers compared this data with data on married couples from the 1960s and 1980s, they found that people in the recent period increasingly turned to partners with the same salary and education level. And while many people married someone of the same ethnicity, people became less and less selective about race over time.

Who people marry has a major impact on household income. The research shows that the two main factors contributing to inequality in the selection of a future spouse are education and skills. They are followed, to a much lesser extent, by income and age, while race plays a relatively minor role, said co-author Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría, an economic policy adviser at St. Louis Fed, in a blog post describing the work. .

Overall, the predominance of online dating applications 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 is largely explained by sorting along vertical characteristics such as income and skill and their interaction with education,” the economists wrote in their paper.