Intergenerational Mobility of Daughters and Marital Sorting: New Evidence from Imperial China

We study the role of marriage for women's intergenerational mobility during the Ming-Qing (1368-1911) period. Using status information based on the timing of marriage from family histories in Central China, already in the early 1500s it is the case that daughters from rich families attain higher status over their lifetime than daughters from poorer families. This intergenerational status persistence is partly due to marital sorting because daughters from high-status families tend to become the wives of sons who themselves come from rich families. Quantitatively, the correlation of 0.6 between the status of biological and in-law families means that marriage accounts for more than one third of total intergenerational status transmission, while not accounting for marriage overestimates mobility by more than 20 percent. Further underscoring the importance of marriage, typically the status of the in-law family plays a larger role for intergenerational status transmission than the child's biological grandparents. Over the period 1500 to 1900, the degree of marital sorting falls, as does intergenerational persistence. Lower investments in the marriage market to find a good match for a daughter go hand in hand with the fall in the returns to son education due to the decline of China's civil service examination.