Educational marital homogamy, the tendency to marry individuals with the same level of education, arguably leads to a concentration of resources within households. Trends of increasing educational marital homogamy, observed in some countries, have therefore sparked concern about its consequences for economic inequality between households. Existing empirical investigations of this claim have led to mixed results depending on the country studied. This calls for comparative cross-national research on the topic.

The aim of this paper is therefore to compare a wide set of European countries, using cross-nationally comparable measures, in order to test hypotheses about contexts within which educational homogamy has the most and the least influence on economic inequality. We employ the EU-SILC data covering the period 2003-2014 and use a strategy based on decomposing inequality (measured through the Theil-Index) to empirically document the contribution of changes in educational marital homogamy to trends in income inequality in 31 countries.