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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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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States*

TL;DR: In this article, the authors use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States: the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level, the conditional expectation of child income given parent income, and the factors correlated with upward mobility.
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Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research ☆

TL;DR: This paper conducted a meta-analysis of the longitudinal studies that have investigated intelligence as a predictor of success (as measured by education, occupation, and income) in order to better evaluate the predictive power of intelligence, also including meta-analyses of parental socioeconomic status (SES) and academic performance (school grades).
Posted Content

Life-Cycle Variation in the Association between Current and Lifetime Earnings

TL;DR: The authors found that the relationship between current and lifetime earnings departs substantially from the textbook errors-in-variables model in ways that vary systematically over the life cycle, which can enable more appropriate analysis of and correction for errors in variance bias in a wide range of research that uses current earnings to proxy for lifetime earnings.
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Life-cycle variation in the association between current and lifetime earnings

TL;DR: This article found that the relationship between current and lifetime earnings departs substantially from the textbook errors-in-variables model in ways that vary systematically over the life cycle, which can enable more appropriate analysis of, and correction for, errors in variance bias in any research that uses current earnings to proxy for lifetime earnings.
Journal ArticleDOI

Trends in Intergenerational Income Mobility

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make more efficient use of the available information in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and generate more reliable estimates of the recent time-series variation in intergenerational mobility.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Do birth order and family size matter for intergenerational income mobility? Evidence from Sweden

TL;DR: This paper used a large sample of individuals born between 1962 and 1964; income elasticities with respect to parents' incomes are estimated for individuals with different birth-order positions and family sizes.
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The effects of measurement error and omitted variables when using transition matrices to measure intergenerational mobility

TL;DR: This article examined the consequences of specification error when transition matrices are used to analyse patterns of intergenerational mobility and found that classical measurement error in both the child's and parent's earnings can lead to biased results, with summary mobility measures biased by as much as 20% in some cases.
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Social class, family background, and intergenerational mobility

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the various approaches taken by economists and sociologists for analyzing intergenerational mobility and concluded that the individual's family background has a small but significant impact on lifetime chances which is not captured by the Erikson-Goldthorpe classification scheme.

Personality and the intergenerational transmission of earnings

TL;DR: This paper investigated the influence of personality on the intergenerational transmission of earnings and found that personality reduces the unexplained portion of the transmission and familial similarities in personality account for almost eleven percent of transmission of income.