Divorce, Educational Attainment, and the Earnings Mobility of Sons

This article uses matched pairs of sons and their parents from the National Longitudinal Surveys: Old Cohort Databases to investigate the relationship between the marital history of parents, educational attainment, and intergenerational correlations in earnings. The research indicates that patterns of intergenerational earnings mobility vary with divorce. Sons from families whose divorced parents had relatively low earnings have a greater chance of having low earnings themselves. The research also shows that much of the variation in earnings mobility can be explained by lower educational attainment for children from divorced families. This finding highlights the importance of designing policies to assist the educational attainment of those most likely to be affected by divorce.