Marital Sorting, Household Labor Supply, and Intergenerational Earnings Mobility across Countries

Oddbjørn Raaum (), Bernt Bratsberg (), Knut Røed (), Eva Österbacka (), Tor Eriksson (), Markus Jäntti () and Robin Andrew Naylor ()
Additional contact information
Oddbjørn Raaum: Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research
Eva Österbacka: Åbo Akademi University
Markus Jäntti: Åbo Akademi University

No 3037, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: We present comparable evidence on intergenerational earnings mobility for Denmark, Finland, Norway, the UK and the US, with a focus on the role of gender and marital status. We confirm that earnings mobility in the Nordic countries is typically greater than in the US and in the UK, but find that, in contrast to all other groups, for married women mobility is approximately uniform across countries when estimates are based on women's own earnings. Defining offspring outcomes in terms of family earnings, on the other hand, leads to estimates of intergenerational mobility in the Nordic countries which exceed those for the US and the UK for both men and women, single and married. Unlike in the Nordic countries, we find that married women with children and with husbands from affluent backgrounds tend to exhibit reduced labor supply in the US and the UK. In these countries, it is the combination of assortative mating and labor supply responses which weakens the association between married women's own earnings and their parents' earnings.

Keywords: assortative mating; intergenerational mobility; joint labor supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J3 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Date: 2007-09
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Related works:
Working Paper: Marital Sorting, Household Labor Supply, and Intergenerational Earnings Mobility across Countries (2007)
Journal Article: Marital Sorting, Household Labor Supply, and Intergenerational Earnings Mobility across Countries (2008)
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