Love and Money: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Household Sorting and Inequality

Arbeitspapier

This paper examines the interactions between household matching, inequality, and per capita income. We develop a model in which agents decide whether to become skilled or unskilled, form households, consume and have children. We show that the equilibrium sorting of spouses by skill type (their correlation in education) is increasing as a function of the skill premium. In the absence of perfect capital markets, the economy can converge to dierent steady states, depending upon initial conditions. The degree of marital sorting, wage inequality, and fertility dierentials are positively correlated across steady states and negatively correlated with per capita income. We use household surveys from 34 countries to construct several measures of the skill premium and of the degree of correlation of spouses' education (marital sorting). For all our measures, we find a positive and significant relationship between the two variables.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: LIS Working Paper Series ; No. 283

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft
• Thema: Qualifikation ; Einkommensverteilung ; Fertilität ; Theorie ; Ehe

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Fernández, Raquel ; Guner, Nezih ; Knowles, John
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Luxembourg Income Study (LIS)
• (wo): Luxembourg
• (wann): 2001

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/160955
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:43 MEZ