Marriage and the Intergenerational Mobility of Women: Evidence from Marriage Certificates 1850-1920

Reva Balakrishnan, Abi James, Simran Kalkat, and Daniel Scates provided excellent research assistance. We have benefited from helpful comments from Leah Boustan, Gregory Clark, Matthew Curtis, José Antonio Espín-Sánchez, Walker Hanlon, Bhashkar Mazumder, Joel Mokyr, Charles Moul, and Melissa Thomasson. We also thank seminar and conference participants at Stanford University, Northwestern University, Yale University, University of California - Berkeley, University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, Louisiana State University, Southern Denmark University, Oxford University, Warwick University, Bristol University, The U.S. Census Bureau seminar series, the 2023 NBER Economics of Mobility Fall Meeting, the 2023 Western Economic Association Meetings, the 2022 Economic History Association Meetings, the 2019 Cliometrics Society Meetings, and Statistics Norway’s Workshop on Intergenerational Mobility, Gender and Family Formation in the Long Run. Rashid acknowledges generous funding from the Northwestern Center for Economic History and the Robert Eisner Memorial Fellowship. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.