Parental Assortative Mating and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital

Paul Bingley (), Lorenzo Cappellari and Konstantinos Tatsiramos
Additional contact information
Paul Bingley: VIVE - The Danish Centre for Applied Social Science

No 14300, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the contribution of parental similarity in schooling levels to the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment. We develop an empirical model for educational correlations within the family in which parental sorting can translate into intergenerational transmission, or transmission can originate from each parent independently. Estimating the model using educational attainment from Danish population-based administrative data for over 400,000 families, we find that about 75 percent of the intergenerational correlation in education is driven by the joint contribution of the parents. We also document a sizeable secular decline of parental assortative mating in education, with a corresponding fall in joint intergenerational transmission from both parents; a fall compensated by an increase in parent-specific intergenerational transmission, leaving total intergenerational persistence unchanged. The mechanisms of intergenerational transmission have changed, with an increased importance of one-to-one parent-child relationships.

Keywords: human capital; intergenerational transmission; assortative mating; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2022, 77, 102047

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14300.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Parental assortative mating and the intergenerational transmission of human capital (2022)
Working Paper: Parental Assortative Mating and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital (2021)
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:iza:izadps:dp14300

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().