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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Posted Content
Decentralization of wage determination. Evidence from a national teacher reform
TL;DR: This paper used Swedish registry data and exploited a reform that replaced the fixed national pay scale for teachers with individual wage bargaining to provide new evidence on the labor market effects of wage decentralization.
Journal ArticleDOI
Switching regression estimates of the intergenerational persistence of consumption
TL;DR: This article studied the relationship between credit constraint and intergenerational consumption persistence, using bequest receipt as the signal of constraint status for the parental households, and found evidence that inter vivos transfers are consistent with both motives.
Posted Content
Intergenerational Transmission of Unemployment - Causal Evidence from Austria
TL;DR: In this paper, the causal effect of parents' unemployment on their children in their own adulthood was estimated using administrative data for Austrian children born between 1974 and 1984 and apply an instrumental variables (IV) identification strategy using parents' job loss during a mass layoff as the instrument.
Journal ArticleDOI
Local Intergenerational Mobility
TL;DR: This article investigated whether the observed patterns of economic mobility exhibit heterogeneity across socioeconomic groups and whether the nature of the heterogeneity can be explained by different levels of persistence in the intergenerational transmission of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities across these groups.
Book ChapterDOI
Reproduction of Economic Inequalities: Are the Figures for the United States and United Kingdom Too High?
TL;DR: This paper showed that the United States is unusually unfair due to larger regional differences in labour market returns and/or stronger associations between parents' and their children's ability, ability and education attainment, and education and earnings.
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.