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
Your American Dream is Not Mine! A New Approach to Estimating Intergenerational Mobility Elasticities
Yonghong An,Wang Le,Ruli Xiao +2 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a new framework was proposed to estimate intergenerational mobility elasticities (IGE) of children's income with respect to parental income, allowing for heterogeneity in IGEs and nonlinearity by leaving the relationship unspecified.
Journal ArticleDOI
Tough love for lazy kids: Dynamic insurance and equal bequests
Ctirad Slavík,Kevin Wiseman +1 more
TL;DR: This paper developed a dynamic insurance model to explain a central puzzle in intergenerational transfers: gifts partially compensate children for negative income shocks, but bequests are typically divided equally in most families.
Journal ArticleDOI
A meta-analysis of the association between income inequality and intergenerational mobility
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide an overview of associations between income inequality and intergenerational mobility in the United States, Canada, and eight European countries, and analyze whether this correlation is ob...
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Lifetime inequality: Income and occupational differences and dynamics in the US
Deirdre Bloome,Jane Furey +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a coherent framework links intra-generational mobility and inequality, showing how movement into different income positions during adulthood tends to equalize incomes in the long term, while income persistence from parents to their adult children maintains inequality.
Journal ArticleDOI
Empirical strategies to eliminate life-cycle bias in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings literature
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the empirical strategies for estimation of the intergenerational elasticity of lifetime earnings that are currently employed in the literature might not eliminate bias arising from life-cycle effects.
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.
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.