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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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Posted Content

Understanding intergenerational economic mobility by decomposing joint distributions

TL;DR: In this paper, a simple and generalizable decomposition method is proposed to evaluate intergenerational economic mobility, which is based on the estimation of counterfactual joint distributions consistent with (actual and counter-factual) conditional distributions estimated via distributional regression and covariates.
Book ChapterDOI

The Inheritance of Employers and Nonlinearities in Intergenerational Earnings Mobility

TL;DR: A growing literature addressing the intergenerational transmission of earnings often forms the backdrop for policy discussions dealing with equality of opportunity as discussed by the authors, motivated theoretically by models of parental investments in the human capital of their children as in Becker and Tomes (1986, 1979) and Loury (1981).
Journal ArticleDOI

The PSID in Research and Policy.

TL;DR: This short review covers major policy-related strengths from PSID research in the areas of event history analysis; mobility and volatility; cross national comparisons; health and health insurance; mobility into and out of poverty; the effects of parental income on children; and the use of the child development sample to broaden the PSID policy focus in new and interesting ways.
Posted Content

Parental Time Investment and Human Capital Formation: A Quantitative Analysis of Intergenerational Mobility

TL;DR: In this article, a quantitative general equilibrium model that explores parental time investment in preschool-aged and younger children as a channel through which economic status can be transmitted intergenerationally is presented.
Journal ArticleDOI

Movilidad intrageneracional del ingreso en Chile

TL;DR: In this article, a trabajo se estiman los diferentes indices de movilidad intrageneracional for Chile sobre la base of the panel Casen.
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.