Trends in intergenerational earnings mobility (original) (raw)
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Assessing changes in intergenerational earnings mobility
Previous research on changes in intergenerational mobility suggests that the mobility is decreasing over time. One explanation for this pattern is increased cross-sectional income inequality. In contrast to most other OECD countries, the income inequality in Norway has been remarkably stable through large parts of the 1980s and the 1990s, not the least due to a compression of the earnings distribution during the same period. Using longitudinal data for Norwegian children born 1950, -55, -60, and -65, we find a relatively high degree of earnings mobility. Furthermore, there is no tendency to increasing inequality along this dimension. This finding supports the hypothesis that intergenerational mobility is positively correlated with a compressed income distribution. Quartile father-child earnings transition matrices, together with nonparametric regressions, indicate quite high mobility in the middle of the distribution and somewhat more persistence at the top and bottom. This approach also reveals increased mobility over time for sons, but a less clear picture for daughters.
Trends in Intergenerational Income Mobility
Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009
Previous studies of recent U.S. trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results, partly because of large sampling errors. By making more efficient use of the available information in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we generate more reliable estimates of the recent time-series variation in intergenerational mobility. Our results, which pertain to the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975, do not reveal major changes in intergenerational mobility.
A quantile analysis of intergenerational income mobility in the US (1980-2010)
2014
Using family income from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we apply Quantile Regression to estimate the Intergenerational Income Elasticity (IGE) by percentiles in the U.S. from 1980 to 2010. For the whole period, the IGE shows a Ushape across the income distribution, with maximum values at the tails (0.66 at the 10th percentile and 0.48 at the 90th percentile) and a minimum value {highest mobility- of 0.37 at the 70th percentile. These values contrast with the Ordinary Least Square estimate, which is 0.47. The trend evolution of the IGE varies also across the income distribution. While for all percentiles up to the median (and OLS) the trend of IGE was decreasing in the 80s and 90s and slightly increasing in the 00s, the IGE remained relatively stable for the richer along the whole period. With respect to the channels of intergenerational income transmission, son’s education and race were found to be important.
Intergenerational Mobility: Trends Across the Earnings Distribution
The analysis, based on register data for Norwegian cohorts born 1950, 1955, and 1960, shows that the intergenerational earnings mobility is high. Using quantile regression, mobility is found to be lower at the lower end of the earnings distribution than at the upper end. The findings also indicate that mobility increases over time and that the increase seems to be somewhat higher for lower earnings. Finally, we find that the increase in earnings mobility over time has been larger for women than for men.
Intergenerational earnings mobility : an evaluation using data on three generations
This paper examines the extent and evolution of intergenerational earnings mobility in France. We use data from five waves of the French Education-Training-Employment (FQP) surveys covering the period 1964 to 1993. Our estimation procedure follows Björklund and Jäntti (1997)'s two-sample instrumental variable method. On our samples, the elasticity of son's (respectively daughter's) long-run income with respect to father's long run income is around .4 (resp. .3) with no significant change over the period under scrutiny. Comparing these estimates to results obtained from other studies suggest that intergenerational mobility is higher in France than in the United States and United Kingdom and lower than in Scandinavian countries.
Intergenerational Mobility in Lifetime Income
Review of Income and Wealth, 2021
The two-stage approach to estimating intergenerational income mobility from panel data, proposed here, reduces age-related attenuation error and measurement error. The first stage estimates parents’ and children’s lifetime family income from linked longitudinal; the second stage uses these estimates to derive measures of absolute, relative and rank mobility. Applying this to United States PSID data, for sons born between 1952 and 1981 and their fathers, we find multiple indications of a decline in intergenerational mobility. This approach is robust to the addition of new data, and can be applied to improve the accuracy of mobility estimates derived from snapshot data.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
We use PSID data to 2008 to consider changes in the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) of income in fifteen successive ten-year cohort-groups of sons aged 36-45 between 1997 and 2011. Regressing sons' estimated lifetime income on fathers' income within each group, we obtain fifteen IGE estimates, which exhibit a significant rising trend, as do intergenerational correlations and rank correlations. The Gini coefficient of sons' lifetime income within these groups exhibits a correlation of 0.71 with our IGE estimates, leading us to conclude that as the United States has become economically less equal in recent years it has also become less mobile.
Intergenerational Earnings Mobility Revisited: Estimates Based on Lifetime Earnings*
The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2012
Using Norwegian intergenerational data, which include a substantial part of the life-cycle earnings for children and almost the entire life-cycle earnings for their fathers, we present new estimates of intergenerational mobility. Extending the length of fathers' earnings window from 5 to 25 years increases estimated elasticities. Increasing the age at which fathers' earnings are observed has the opposite effect. Biases in the estimated elasticities are related to both transitory earnings variation and life-cycle measurement error; the former appear to be more important than the latter. Estimation bias stemming from persistence in transitory innovations plays only a minor role. Our findings indicate that intergenerational earnings mobility in Norway might have been strongly overstated in many earlier studies with shorter earnings histories. Some of our new estimates are twice as large as earlier estimates.
Nonlinear Estimation of Lifetime Intergenerational Economic Mobility and the Role of Education
Previous studies of intergenerational income mobility have typically focused at on estimating persistence across generations at the mean of the distribution of sons' earnings. Here, we use the relatively new unconditional quantile regression (UQR) technique to consider how the association between parental income in childhood and sons' adult earnings vary across the distribution of sons' earnings. We find a Jshaped relationship between parental income and sons' earnings, with parental income a particularly strong predictor of labour market success for those at the bottom, and to a greater extent, the top of the earnings distribution. We explore the potential role of early skills, education and early labour market attachment in this process. Worryingly, we find that education is not as meritocratic as we might hope, with the role of parental income dominating that of education at the top of the distribution of earnings. Early unemployment experience has long-lasting impacts on sorting those at the bottom, alongside parental income.