Race and Mobility in U.S. Marriage Markets: Quantifying the Role of Segregation

Ariel Binder, Caroline Walker, Jonathan Eggleston and Marta Murray-Close

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: We examine racial disparities in upward intergenerational mobility of family income by linking American Community Survey respondents born in 1978-87 to their parents� tax records. This linkage facilitates better measurement of marriage-market processes than tax records alone. Relative to White individuals, we document lower upward mobility of partner income for Black, Hispanic, and Asian individuals. These disparities offset Asian women and men�s advantages in personal income mobility, overturn Black women�s small advantage, and compound Black men�s disadvantage. We develop a novel nonparametric decomposition which reveals that these disparities are driven primarily by racial differences in marriage-market opportunities, but also by different partnering rates conditional on opportunities. We then apply a selection-correction methodology to estimate causal effects of childhood exposure to racial segregation. Our design approximates a shift in the current generation�s segregation exposure, holding historical exposures constant. This channel generates substantial Black-White intergenerational mobility gaps across all income measures, and we show that these effects cumulate over a multigenerational horizon.

Keywords: marriage market; intergenerational mobility; tax records; family income; racial inequality; racial segregation; race-gender intersection; selection correction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J12 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2022-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-lab and nep-ure
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https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2022/CES-WP-22-59R.pdf Revised version, 2024 (application/pdf)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2022/CES-WP-22-59.pdf First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:22-59

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