Is Intergenerational Earnings Mobility Affected by Divorce?Angela Fertig
No 953, Working Papers from Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. Abstract: This study examines whether the intergenerational transmission of human capital, measured by intergenerational earnings mobility, is affected by divorce. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I find that, with each additional year in a family involving a single or a step parent, the earnings mobility between biological fathers and children rises and the mobility between mothers and daughters falls. However, using either sibling fixed effects or instrumental variable estimation, I find that the association between family structure and father-child mobility is explained by selection. These findings have two important implications. First, they imply that the increase in father-son mobility observed in other studies can be explained by the rise in single and step parent families over the same period. Second, these findings imply that the connection between fathers and children would have been weak whether or not a divorce occurred, which does not support the hypothesis that father absence is an important factor contributing to differences in child outcomes across family structures. Keywords: intergenerational earnings mobility; family structure (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:crcwel:wp02-04-fertig.pdf Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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