Assortative Mating and Intergenerational Persistence of Schooling and Earnings

Abstract

Research on intergenerational mobility has often treated outcomes such as schooling and earnings as being imperfectly transmitted from one parent to a child. But because the characteristics of both parents are important in shaping children’s outcomes, the way in which a generation of parents is sorted into couples is likely to be a key determinant of intergenerational persistence. Mating patterns are assortative—that is, individuals tend to partner with people similar to themselves—and this is typically measured by similarity of educational attainment. I present the first estimates of the effect of assortative mating on intergenerational persistence of schooling and earnings. I measure assortative mating as the rank correlation of couples’ educational attainment, that is, the degree to which the most highly-educated men partner with the most highly-educated women. Using data on parents and children in the United States, I find that assortative mating explains about one quarter of the observed intergenerational persistence of schooling and earnings.