Journal ArticleDOI
Fortunate Sons: New Estimates of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States Using Social Security Earnings Data
TLDR
This article found that intergenerational mobility is significantly lower for families with little or no wealth, offering empirical support for theoretical models that predict differences due to borrowing constraints, suggesting that the United States is substantially less mobile than previous research indicated.Abstract:
Previous studies, relying on short-term averages of fathers' earnings, have estimated the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) in earnings to be approximately 0.4. Due to persistent transitory fluctuations, these estimates have been biased down by approximately 30% or more. Using administrative data containing the earnings histories of parents and children, the IGE is estimated to be around 0.6. This suggests that the United States is substantially less mobile than previous research indicated. Estimates of intergenerational mobility are significantly lower for families with little or no wealth, offering empirical support for theoretical models that predict differences due to borrowing constraints.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Intergenerational Elasticity of What? The Case for Redefining the Workhorse Measure of Economic Mobility:
Pablo A. Mitnik,David B. Grusky +1 more
TL;DR: The intergenerational elasticity (IGE) has been assumed to refer to the expectation of children's income when in fact it pertains to the geometric mean of children' income.
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Assessing Intergenerational Earnings Persistence Among German Workers
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors assess the relationship between father and son earnings among (West) German workers and find that about 1/3 of the earnings differential in the labor market has been passed on from the generation of fathers to their sons.
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Interpreting Trends in Intergenerational Income Mobility
Martin Nybom,Jan Stuhler +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine how intergenerational income mobility responds to structural changes in a simple theoretical model of inter-generational transmission, deviating from the existing literature by explicitly analyzing the transition path between steady states, and find that mobility depends not only on current but also on past transmission mechanisms, such that changing policies, institutions or economic conditions may generate longlasting trends.
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Life-Cycle Variations in the Association Between Current and Lifetime Income: Country, Cohort and Gender Comparisons
TL;DR: In this paper, life cycle variations in the association between current and lifetime income between countries, Cohort and Gender Comparisons were found to be correlated with life cycle variation in the Association Between Current and Lifetime Income.
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Intergenerational mobility across Australia and the stability of regional estimates
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors produce the first estimates of intergenerational mobility in Australia using administrative data, covering a million individuals born between 1978 and 1982, and they find that regions with higher incomes and lower unemployment rates tend to have higher expected ranks for those raised there; while regions with less segregation and higher school attendance rates have weaker intergeneration persistence in income ranks.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
An Equilibrium Theory of the Distribution of Income and Intergenerational Mobility
Gary S. Becker,Nigel Tomes +1 more
TL;DR: The theory of inequality and intergenerational mobility presented in this paper assumes that each family maximizes a utility function spanning several generations, which depends on the consumption of parents and on the quantity and quality of their children.
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Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States
TL;DR: For example, this article showed that the intergenerational correlation in long-run income is at least 0.4, indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research, indicating less mobility.
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Human Capital Policy
TL;DR: This paper showed the importance of cognitive and non-cognitive skills that are formed early in the life cycle in accounting for racial, ethnic and family background gaps in schooling and other dimensions of socioeconomic success.
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Least absolute deviations estimation for the censored regression model
TL;DR: In this paper, an alternative to maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters of the censored regression (or censored 'Tobit' model) is proposed, which is a generalization of least absolute deviations estimation for the standard linear model, and is also robust to heteroscedasticity.
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The Dynamics of Educational Attainment for Black, Hispanic, and White Males
TL;DR: The authors found that the long-run factors associated with parental background and family environment, and not credit constraints facing prospective students in the college-going years, account for most of the racial and ethnic disparities in college attendance.