In interpreting the positive relationship between spousal education and one's earnings,
economists have two major hypotheses: cross-productivity between couples and
assortative mating. However, no prior empirical study has been able to separate the
two effects. This paper empirically disentangles the two effects by using twins data
that we collected from urban China. We have two major innovations: we use twins
data to control for the unobserved mating effect in our estimations, and we estimate
both current and wedding-time earnings equations. Arguably, the cross-productivity
effect takes time to be realized and thus is relatively unimportant at the time of the
wedding. Any effect of spousal education on wedding-time earnings should more likely
be the mating effect. We find that both cross-productivity and mating are important
in explaining the current earnings. Although the mating effect exists for both husbands
and wives, the cross-productivity effect only runs from Chinese husbands to wives. We
further show that the cross-productivity effect is realized by increasing the hourly wage
rate rather than working hours.