The second time around: Educational attainment and repartnering in the Russian Federation and Estonia

We examined how people’s educational attainment was related to their behaviours on the repartnering market in the Russian Federation and Estonia. We addressed the following questions: 1) What is the effect of education on repartnering?; 2) What is the effect of own education on whom people repartner with (i.e., the new partner’s educational attainment)? and 3) Does the educational level of the expartner matter for whom people repartner with? We examined the partnership histories of the participants in the Generations and Gender Survey and estimated discrete-time event-history (logistic and multinomial) models for the transition from first to second marital or non-marital cohabiting union. Men’s rate of repartnering was higher for the higher educated whereas educational attainment played no role for women’s repartnering. We observed a tendency towards educational homogamy in higher order unions. Interestingly, when the educational "match" in the first union was accounted for, our results indicated that people reproduced their partnering matches.