An International Comparison of Social Mobility from the Perspective of Assortative Mating

Abstract

This paper compares the social mobility of OECD countries using PISA data, which contain information on the educational attainment of parents of 15-year-old students. We derive several measures of the degree of assortative mating in terms of educational attainment at the country level from parents' educational attainment. It turns out that Eastern European countries have a high degree of assortative mating while Northern European countries have a distinctively lower degree. Furthermore, for 12 countries with measures of intergenerational income elasticity, we find a positive relationship between the degree of assortative mating and the intergenerational income elasticity. Compared with other OECD countries, Korea has a somewhat high degree of assortative mating. From the degree of assortative mating by educational attainment, we can infer that the intergenerational income elasticity of Korea might be between 0.3 and 0.4, which is higher than that found in previous studies.