The Historical Evolution of the Education-Specific Mating Squeeze from a Sub-National Perspective

Erich Striessnig , University of Vienna
Nadia Steiber, University of Vienna
Ruslan Basyrov, University of Vienna
Laura Zilian, University of Vienna

Austria, Germany, and Switzerland have repeatedly been found to lag behind in the shift towards growing educational hypogamy that has followed the reversal in the gender gap in education. Here we use four decades’ worth of Austrian census data to explore this phenomenon under a historical perspective at the sub-national level. We construct a municipality-specific mate-market measure based on travel times extracted from OpenStreetMap. For each of these mate-markets, we derive various indicators of the education-specific mating squeeze. Relating the squeeze values to different demographic and economic, municipality-level covariates, we find the squeeze to be driven predominantly by developments in Austria’s low-density areas, with the role of population density reversing over time. These sub-national variations still need to be explored further. Eventually, we hope to contribute to an improved understanding of educational assortative mating at the local, mate-market level.

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 Presented in Session 52. Flash Session Advances in Subnational and Small-Area Population Analysis