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Marital Sorting and Parental Wealth

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  • Kerwin Charles
  • Erik Hurst
  • Alexandra Killewald

Abstract

The extent of marital sorting by socioeconomic background has implications for the intergenerational transmission of inequality, the role of marriage as a mechanism for social mobility, and the extent of cross-group interactions within a society. However, studies of assortative mating have disproportionately focused on spouses’ education, rather than their social origins. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and exploiting the unique genealogical design of the data set, we study the degree to which spouses sort on the basis of parental wealth. We find that the estimated correlation in parental wealth among married spouses, after controlling for race and age, is about .4. Importantly, we show that controlling for spousal education explains only one-quarter of sorting based on parental wealth. We show that our results are robust to accounting for measurement error in spousal reports of parental wealth and for selection into and out of marriage. Copyright Population Association of America 2013

Suggested Citation

  • Kerwin Charles & Erik Hurst & Alexandra Killewald, 2013. "Marital Sorting and Parental Wealth," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 50(1), pages 51-70, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:demogr:v:50:y:2013:i:1:p:51-70
    DOI: 10.1007/s13524-012-0144-6
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social mobility; Marriage; Inequality; Multigenerational; Wealth;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure

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