  We apply a pseudo panel analysis of survey data from the years 2010 and 2017
about Americans' self-reported marital preferences and perform some formal
tests on the sign and magnitude of the change in educational homophily from the
generation of the early Boomers to the late Boomers, as well as from the early
GenerationX to the late GenerationX. In the analysis, we control for changes in
preferences over the course of the survey respondents' lives. We use the test
results to decide whether the popular iterative proportional fitting (IPF)
algorithm, or its alternative, the NM-method is more suitable for analyzing
revealed marital preferences. These two methods construct different tables
representing counterfactual joint educational distributions of couples.
Thereby, they disagree on the trend of revealed preferences identified from the
prevalence of homogamy by counterfactual decompositions. By finding
self-reported homophily to display a U-shaped pattern, our tests reject the
hypothesis that the IPF is suitable for constructing counterfactuals in
general, while we cannot reject the applicability of the NM. The significance
of our survey-based method-selection is due to the fact that the choice between
the IPF and the NM makes a difference not only to the identified historical
trend of revealed homophily, but also to what future paths of social inequality
are believed to be possible.
