  In this paper, I generalize the Naszodi-Mendonca method in order to identify
changes in marital preferences over multiple dimensions, such as the partners'
race and education level. Similar to the original Naszodi-Mendonca method,
preferences are identified by the generalized method through estimating their
effects on marriage patterns, in particular, on the share of inter-racial
couples, and the share of educationally homogamous couples. This is not a
simple task because marriage patterns are shaped not only by marital
preferences, but also by the distribution of marriageable males and females by
traits. The generalized Naszodi-Mendonca method is designed for constructing
counterfactuals to perform the decomposition. I illustrate the application of
the generalized Naszodi-Mendonca method by decomposing changes in the
prevalence of racial and educational homogamy in the 1980s using US data from
IPUMS.
