Intergenerational Mobility and Marital Sorting

We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the extent of intergenerational economic mobility in a framework that highlights the role played by assortative mating. We find that assortative mating plays an important role. On average about 40-50% of the covariance between parents and own permanent family income can be attributed to the person to whom one is married. This effect is driven by strong spouse correlations in human capital, which are larger in Germany than Britain. © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2006.