  We develop a method suitable for detecting whether racial homophily is on the
rise and also whether the economic divide (i.e., the gap between individuals
with different education levels and thereby with different abilities to
generate income) is growing in a society. We identify these changes with the
changing aggregate marital preferences over the partners' race and education
level through their effects on the share of inter-racial couples and the share
of educationally homogamous couples. These shares are shaped not only by
preferences, but also by the distributions of marriageable men and women by
traits. The method proposed is designed to control for changes in the trait
distributions from one generation to another. By applying the method, we find
the economic divide in the US to display a U-curve pattern between 1960 and
2010 followed by its slightly negative trend between 2010 and 2015. The
identified trend of racial homophily suggests that the American society has
become more and more permissive towards racial intermarriages since 1970.
Finally, we refute the aggregate version of the status-cast exchange hypothesis
based on the joint dynamics of the economic divide and the racial homophily.

General Economics;Economics