TY  - JOUR
AU  - Fernandez,Raquel
AU  - Rogerson,Richard
TI  - Sorting and Long-Run Inequality
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7508
PY  - 2000
Y2  - January 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7508
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7508.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Raquel Fernández
Department of Economics
New York University
19 West 4th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY  10012
Tel: 212/998-8908
Fax: 212/995-4186
E-Mail: raquel.fernandez@nyu.edu

Richard Rogerson
Woodrow Wilson School of
  Public and International Affairs
323 Bendheim Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609-258-4839
Fax: 609-258-5349
E-Mail: rdr@princeton.edu
AB  - Many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in a society can lead to greater inequality. To investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition, fertility, and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to match several basic empirical findings. Contrary to Kremer's (1997) finding of a basically insignificant effect of marital sorting on inequality, we find that increased marital sorting will significantly increase income inequality. Three factors are central to our findings: a negative correlation between fertility and education, a decreasing marginal effect of parental education on children's years of education, and wages that are sensitive to the relative supply of skilled workers.
ER  -