Abstract:While current literature on marital sorting focuses alternatively on the role of schooling or on the role of wages, we argue that both variables simultaneously determine the level of assortative mating, since schooling and wages are never perfectly correlated. Using data from the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW), with families tracked longitudinally from 1989 to 2004, we estimate a system of simultaneous mating equations for wages and schooling. We find evidence that cross-effects of these variables account for between 4,6% and 7,3%.