How marriage matters for the intergenerational mobility of family income: heterogeneity by gender, life course and birth cohort

Journal article

Adult children’s labor market status and the kind of marriage are major channels through which family advantages are passed from one generation to the next. However, those two routes have seldom been studied together. We develop a theoretical approach to incorporate marriage entry and marital sorting into the intergenerational transmission of family income, accounting for differences between sons and daughters and considering education as a central explanatory factor. Using a novel decomposition method applied to data from the Panel Study of income Dynamics we find that marriage plays a major role in intergenerational transmission only among daughters and not until they reach their late30s. This is more salient in the more recent cohort in our data (people born 1963-75). Marital status and marital sorting are comparably important in accounting for the role of marriage, but sorting becomes more important over cohorts. The increasing earnings returns to education over a husband’s career and the weakening association between parental income and daughter’s own earnings explain why marital sorting, and marriage overall, have been growing more important for intergenerational transmission from parents to their daughters.

Authors: Choi, S; Chung, I; Breen, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: American Sociological Association
• Journal: American Sociological Review
• Volume: 85
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 353-380
• Publication date: 2020-05-12
• Acceptance date: 2020-02-01
• DOI: 10.1177/0003122420917591
• ISSN: 0003-1224
• Language: English
• Keywords: intergenerational elasticity (IGE); FFR; intergenerational mobility; marriage; family income; PSID