scispace - formally typeset
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
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Intergenerational Earnings Persistence and Economic Inequality in the Long Run: Evidence from French Cohorts, 1931–75

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed long-term trends in intergenerational earnings persistence in France for male cohorts born between 1931 and 1975, using a two-sample instrumental variables approach.
Journal ArticleDOI

Top Incomes, Rising Inequality and Welfare

TL;DR: This paper developed a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980.
Journal ArticleDOI

Black Female Earnings and Income Volatility

TL;DR: For example, this article used matched data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) to study the earnings and income volatility among Black women in the United States over the past four decades.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Concept of Academic Mobility: Normative and Methodological Considerations:

TL;DR: Most of the literature on the development of educational inequality has operated under the achievement gap paradigm, often assuming that the underlying normative and methodological foundations rel... as mentioned in this paper, which assumes that the achievement gaps are defined by a set of assumptions.
Posted Content

Multiple Sample Selection in the Estimation of Intergenerational Occupational Mobility

TL;DR: This paper shows how to use new methods to estimate linear and quantile intergenerational mobility equations taking account of multiple sample selection.
References
More filters
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.