Essays on intergenerational mobility and its variation over time, place and family structure

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Love and Money: Intergenerational Mobility and Marital Matching on Parental Income

This paper makes use of matched tax-return data for daughters, their parents, their partners and their partners' parents to investigate the interactions between intergenerational mobility and marital matching for young couples in Canada. We show how assortative mating contributes to intergenerational household income persistence. The strength of the association between sons-in-law's income and women's parental income means that the intergenerational link between household incomes is stronger than that found for daughters' own incomes alone. This is also the case when viewed from the other side, so that daughters' and their partners' earnings are related to partners' parental income. These results indicate that assortative matching magnifies individual-level intergenerational persistence. In the second part of the paper we consider assortative mating by parental income. We find that daughter's parental income has an elasticity of almost 0.2 with respect to her partner's parental income. This association is of approximately the same magnitude as the intergenerational link between parents' and children's incomes. We investigate variations in the correlation between the parental incomes across several measured dimensions; cohabiting couples have lower correlations, as do those who form partnerships early, those who live in rural areas and most interestingly, those who later divorce. We interpret this last result as evidence that, on average, couples with parental incomes that are more similar enjoy a more stable match.Families, households and housing, Family history, Household, family and personal income, Income, pensions, spending and wealth

Amour et argent : mobilite intergenerationnelle et appariement conjugal d'apres le revenu des parents

La presente etude repose sur l'appariement de donnees fiscales concernant les filles, leurs parents, leur partenaire et les parents de leur partenaire pour examiner les interactions entre la mobilite intergenerationnelle du revenu et l'appariement conjugal des jeunes couples au Canada. Nous montrons comment l'appariement assortatif contribue a la persistance intergenerationnelle du revenu du menage. La force de l'association entre le revenu du beau-fils et celui des parents de la femme signifie que le lien intergenerationnel est plus puissant pour les revenus du menage que pour le revenu personnel des filles uniquement. Il en est de meme si l'on examine la situation du point de vue oppose, de sorte que les gains des filles et de leur partenaire sont relies au revenu des parents de ce dernier. Ces resultats indiquent que l'appariement assortatif intensifie la persistance intergenerationnelle du revenu au niveau individuel. Dans la deuxieme partie du document, nous considerons l'appariement assortatif selon le revenu parental. Nous constatons que le revenu des parents de la fille a une elasticite de pres de 0,2 par rapport au revenu des parents de son partenaire. Cette association est a peu pres du meme ordre de grandeur que le lien intergenerationnel entre les revenus des parents et des enfants. Nous etudions les variations de la correlation entre les revenus parentaux en fonction de plusieurs variables mesurees; les correlations sont plus faibles pour les couples qui cohabitent, ainsi que pour ceux qui forment tot une union, ceux qui vivent dans les regions rurales et, ce qui est fort interessant, ceux qui divorcent ulterieurement. Nous interpretons ce dernier resultat comme etant la preuve qu'en moyenne, les couples pour lesquels les revenus des parents sont comparables jouissent d'une union plus stable.Families, households and housing, Family history, Household, family and personal income, Income, pensions, spending and wealth

Intergenerational mobility in the united states and great britain: A comparative study of parent-child pathways

We build on cross-national research to examine the relationships underlying estimates of relative intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain using harmonized longitudinal data and focusing on men. We examine several pathways by which parental status is related to offspring status, including education, labor market attachment, occupation, marital status, and health, and perform several sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our results. We decompose differences between the two nations into that part attributable to the strength of the relationship between parental income and the child's characteristics and the labor market return to those child characteristics. We find that the relationships underlying these intergenerational linkages differ in systematic ways between the two nations. In the United States, primarily because of the higher returns to education and skills, the pathway through offspring education is relatively more important than it is in Great Britain; by contrast, in Great Britain the occupation pathway forms the primary channel of intergenerational persistence. © 2013 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

Quantity and quality of childcare and children's educational outcomes

Policy makers wanting to support child development can choose to adjust the quantityor quality of publicly funded universal pre-school. To assess the impact of such changes weestimate the effects of an increase in free pre-school education in England of about 3.5 monthsat age 3 on children's school achievement at age 5. We exploit date-of-birth discontinuitiesthat create variation in the length and starting age of free pre-school using administrativeschool records linked to nursery characteristics. Estimated effects are small overall, but theimpact of the additional term is substantially larger in settings with the highest inspectionquality rating but not in settings with highly qualified staff. Estimated effects fade out byage 7