War and Marriage: Assortative Mating and the World War II GI Bill

World War II and its subsequent GI Bill have been widely credited with playing a transformative role in American society, but there have been few quantitative analyses of these historical events’ broad social effects. We exploit between-cohort variation in the probability of military service to investigate how WWII and the GI Bill altered the structure of marriage, and find that it had important spillover effects beyond its direct effect on men’s educational attainment. Our results suggest that the additional education received by returning veterans caused them to “sort” into wives with significantly higher levels of education. This suggests an important mechanism by
which socioeconomic status may be passed on to the next generation.

Title	War and Marriage: Assortative Mating and the World War II GI Bill
Creator	Patel, A. J.
	Larsen, Matthew F.
	McCarthy, T. J.
	Moulton, J. G.
	Page, M. E.
Publisher	Demography
Academic Department	Economics
Division	Social Sciences
Organization	Lafayette College
Date Issued	2015
Date Available	2023-03-31
Type	Article
Language	English
Keyword	marital sorting
	WWII GI Bill
	education
Bibliographic Citation	Larsen, M. F., et al. (2015) "War and Marriage: Assortative Mating and the World War II GI Bill." Demography 52 (2015): 1431-1461.
Standard Identifier	DOI 10.1007/s13524-015-0426-x
Standard Identifier	Handle 10385/hx11xg668
Permalink	http://hdl.handle.net/10385/hx11xg668
Rights Statement	Creative Commons - Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives
Rights Holders	Patel, A. J.
	Page, M. E.
	Larsen, Matthew F.
	Moulton, J. G.
	McCarthy, T. J.