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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.

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Code and data files for "Public Education Financing, Earnings Inequality, and Intergenerational Mobility"

TL;DR: This article investigated public education and tax policies as a possible source for these differences and found that taxes and public education spending account for about one-third of the differences in earnings inequality and 14 percent of differences in intergenerational earnings persistence between the U.S. and Norway.
Journal ArticleDOI

Growth, Industrialization, and the Intergenerational Correlation of Advantage

TL;DR: This article examined the effects of economic growth on intergenerational mobility in a developing country, namely Indonesia, and found a declining inter-generational correlation of education between parents' and children's education.
Journal ArticleDOI

Childhood Car Access: Long-term Consequences for Education, Employment, and Earnings:

TL;DR: This article used propensity score matching and longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income and Wealth in order to answer the question "Do children suffer long-term consequences when they grow up without a car?"
Book ChapterDOI

Education and Health in Developing Economies

TL;DR: In this article, the authors reviewed recent research on the relationship between education and health in poor countries and found that multiple causal pathways link the two domains, across different phases of an individual's lifecycle and across generations in a family.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

An Equilibrium Theory of the Distribution of Income and Intergenerational Mobility

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.
Posted Content

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.
Posted ContentDOI

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.
Journal ArticleDOI

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.
Journal ArticleDOI

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.