Skills, Parental Sorting, and Child Inequality

Martin Nybom, Erik Plug, Bas van der Klaauw and Lennart Ziegler

No 17821, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more skilled students increasingly enrolled in college and ended up with more skilled partners and more skilled children. Exploiting college expansions, we find that better college access increases both skill sorting in couples and skill and earnings inequality among their children. All findings support the notion that rising earnings inequality is, at least in part, supply driven by rising skill inequality.

Keywords: Assortative; mating (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J11 J12 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17821 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Skills, parental sorting, and child inequality (2023)
Working Paper: Skills, Parental Sorting, and Child Inequality (2022)
Working Paper: Skills, Parental Sorting, and Child Inequality (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17821

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17821

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().