Intergenerational earnings mobility and divorce

Bratberg, Espen; Rieck, Karsten Marshall Elseth; Vaage, Kjell

doi:10.1007/s00148-014-0515-y

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Their study of occupational mobility showed that family dissolution increased the resemblance between sons of different backgrounds, because sons of high-status fathers were more likely than sons of low-status fathers to experience downward occupational mobility if they grew up in a non-intact family. Similar forms of convergence have been found for children’s education and earnings following parental union dissolution (Bernardi & Boertien, 2016 ; Bratberg et al, 2014 ).…”

Section: Theoretical Expectationssupporting

confidence: 67%

Why do Socioeconomic Differences in Women’s Living Standards Converge After Union Dissolution?

Hogendoorn

2022

Eur J Population

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Union dissolution is a critical event for women’s living standards. Previous work has found that women in high-income unions lose more from union dissolution than women in low-income unions. This study proposes two mechanisms to explain this “convergence” in living standards. The compensation mechanism concerns the ability to compensate the loss of partner earnings with alternative sources of income, whereas the partner independence mechanism concerns how much women stand to lose from dissolution in the first place. To test these mechanisms, the author drew on a unique administrative dataset from the Netherlands, covering women who experienced dissolution within ten years after union formation (N = 57,960). A decomposition analysis showed that convergence was not driven by compensation: women from all income groups decreased their household size and re-partnered, women from low-income unions increased transfer income, and women from high-income unions increased personal earnings and decreased tax payments. Instead, convergence was driven by partner independence: women from lower-income unions depended relatively less on their partners because they relied more on transfer income prior to dissolution. These results demonstrate how partners’ interdependence moderates the consequences of life events. The welfare state plays a crucial role in this process.

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Section: Theoretical Expectationssupporting

confidence: 67%

Why do Socioeconomic Differences in Women’s Living Standards Converge After Union Dissolution?

Hogendoorn

2022

Eur J Population

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“…Björklund and Chadwick (2003) found that income persistence is higher among Swedish sons who lived with their biological fathers for more time. Bratberg et al (2014) found that earnings persistence is higher in Norwegian married-parent families than divorced families; children from divorced families are more likely to fall down the earnings distribution. In contrast, in the United States, Couch and Lillard (1997) found lower earnings persistence among sons from married-parent families, whereas Peters (1992) found no association between teen family structure and earnings mobility.…”

Section: Income Mobility Differences By Childhood Family Structurementioning

confidence: 93%

Childhood Family Structure and Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States

Bloome

2017

Demography

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The declining prevalence of two-parent families helped increase income inequality over recent decades. Does family structure also condition how economic (dis)advantages pass from parents to children? If so, shifts in the organization of family life may contribute to enduring inequality between groups defined by childhood family structure. Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, I combine parametric and nonparametric methods to reveal how family structure moderates intergenerational income mobility in the United States. I find that individuals raised outside stable two-parent homes are much more mobile than individuals from stable two-parent families. Mobility increases with the number of family transitions but does not vary with children’s time spent coresiding with both parents or stepparents conditional on a transition. However, this mobility indicates insecurity, not opportunity. Difficulties maintaining middle-class incomes create downward mobility among people raised outside stable two-parent homes. Regardless of parental income, these people are relatively likely to become low-income adults, reflecting a new form of perverse equality. People raised outside stable two-parent families are also less likely to become high-income adults than people from stable two-parent homes. Mobility differences account for about one-quarter of family-structure inequalities in income at the bottom of the income distribution and more than one-third of these inequalities at the top.

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“…Coefficients on birth order themselves vary very little when adding family size to the model. 21 Such models are widely used in the literature on the impact of divorce (Björklund and Sundström, 2006;Le Forner, 2020;Francesconi et al, 2010;Ermisch and Francesconi, 2001;Bratberg et al, 2014). less biased than estimates from the basic LPM.…”

Section: Primary School Enrollmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parental divorces and children’s educational outcomes in Senegal

Crespin-Boucaud

Hotte

2021

World Development

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This paper studies how parental divorce affects investments in children's primary education in Senegal. It provides novel evidence on an under-researched topic: the impact of parental divorces on children in a society where safety nets are more often provided by family than by formal institutions. We use a siblings fixed-effects estimation that exploits the variations in the age of the siblings at the time of divorce while controlling for family-invariant omitted variables. We compare children who were old enough at divorce date to have been enrolled in primary school to their younger siblings, for whom enrollment decisions had not yet been taken at the time of the divorce. We find that younger siblings are more likely than their older siblings to have attended primary school. There are no differences between siblings when considering primary school completion: divorce does not increase the likelihood to drop out from primary school. Overall, divorce does not seem to have negative consequences on children when we consider primary school level outcomes. Disruption caused by a divorce may be more severe for older children.

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Intergenerational earnings mobility and divorce

Cited by 10 publications

References 27 publications

Why do Socioeconomic Differences in Women’s Living Standards Converge After Union Dissolution?

Why do Socioeconomic Differences in Women’s Living Standards Converge After Union Dissolution?

Childhood Family Structure and Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States

Parental divorces and children’s educational outcomes in Senegal

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