A rank-based measure of educational assortative mating

Measures of educational assortative mating must contend with the fact that the marginal distributions of education differ by sex and change over time. I propose a new measure of assortative mating, which is based on Spearman's rank correlation coefficient but instead uses sex-by-birth cohort education ranks. I show that this adjusted measure is more robust than other measures to changes over time in the underlying education distributions.