A comparison of Danish and international findings on integenerational earnings mobility (original) (raw)

Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in Norway: Levels and Trends*

Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2005

Using longitudinal data for Norwegian children born in 1950Norwegian children born in , 1955Norwegian children born in , 1960Norwegian children born in and 1965, we find a relatively high degree of earnings mobility. There is no tendency toward decreasing mobility over the cohorts. Conditioning on the position in the earnings distribution, the analysis indicates 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 Mobility across Offspring's Earnings Distribution in Norway

Industrial Relations, 2007

Using register data for Norwegian cohorts born in 1950Norwegian cohorts born in , 1955Norwegian cohorts born in , and 1960 found intergenerational earnings mobility to be high, and lower at the lower end of offspring's earnings distribution than at the upper end. The findings also indicate that mobility has increased over time and that the increase is somewhat higher for lower earnings. The increase in earnings mobility over time is larger for women than for men. * The authors' affiliations are, respectively,

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.

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.

Money Marries Money - Intergenerational Top Household Income Mobility in Denmark

2016

This paper describes intergenerational earnings and income mobility among top-income households in Denmark. Access to administrative registers allowed us to look at very small fractions of the populations, and to distinguish between sons and daughters and to observe their spouses' incomes. At the top of the income distribution we find a correlation of 0.763 between father and mother's pooled income and that of their son and daughter-in-law's pooled income, which indicates that money marries money.

Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden: What Do Tax-Data Show?

Review of Income and Wealth, 2000

The aim of this paper is to investigate intergenerationai income mobiiity in Sweden by meaiis of a representative sample drawn from tax-data files. Longitudinal data on actual parent-child pairs spanning 1978-92 are employed. Regression and correlation coefficients are analyzed and transition matrices calculated in order to investigate income mobility over generations. The results achieved show high intergenerational income mobility in Sweden between fathers and sons in comparison to estimations performed in most other countries and more especially compared to the U.S. This indicates that Sweden does not only have lower cross-sectional income inequality, but also higher intergenerational income mobility than those countries. The mother's earnings influence children's earnings less than the father's. However, the mother's earnings correlate more strongly with a daughter's earnings than they do with that of a son. The major indication of immobility across generations is found in the upper income deciles. The question whether economic status is transferred from one generation to another has gained increased attention in recent years. Consequently there is a substantial body of literature where the correlation in permanent earnings is estimated across generations. The aim of this paper is to investigate intergenerational income mobility in Sweden using a representative sample drawn from tax-data files. To study intergenerational transmission of earnings status is of interest when studying the character of inequality in a specific society. If there is perfect mobility across generations, it will not matter if your parents belonged to the 90th income percentile or the 10th. The child is independent of its parent's income position. If on the other hand there is no mobility, the child will end up in exactly the same income position as its parents. Most societies are somewhere in-between these extremes and in this study the position of Sweden's intergenerational income mobility will be investigated. Various attempts have been made to estimate the intergenerational income correlation in Sweden. One example is Gustafsson (1994), who uses a homogenous sample where the fathers' incomes were observed for one year only.' However, most studies on intergenerational income mobility have been generated from U.S. data (Behrman and Taubman (1985), Peters (1992), Solon (1992) and Zimmerman (1992)), though some studies of other countries exist as Recently, Note: Financial support from Swedish Council for Social Research (SFR) is gratefully acknowledged. The author would like to thank Bjorn Gustafsson, Katarina Katz, Pernilla Dahlin and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions. h he data consists of sons born between 1939 to 1946 living in Stockholm in the middle of the 1950s. 2~xamples of this are United Kingdom [

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.

Nonlinearities in Intergenerational Earnings Mobility: Consequences for Cross-Country Comparisons

The Economic Journal, 2007

We show that the patterns of intergenerational earnings mobility in Denmark, Finland and Norway, unlike those for the US and the UK, are highly nonlinear. The Nordic relationship between log earnings of sons and fathers is flat in the lower segments of the fathersÕ earnings distribution -sons growing up in the poorest households have the same adult earnings prospects as sons in moderately poor households -and is increasingly positive in middle and upper segments. This convex pattern contrasts sharply with our findings for the US and the UK, where the relationship is much closer to being linear. As a result, cross-country comparisons of intergenerational earnings elasticities may be misleading with respect to transmission mechanisms in the central parts of the earnings distribution and uninformative in the tails of the distribution.

Intergenerational top income persistence: Denmark half the size of Sweden

Economics Letters, 2016

In this paper, we investigate intergenerational top earnings and top income mobility in Denmark. Access to administrative registers allowed us to look at very small fractions of the population. We find that intergenerational mobility is lower in the top when including capital income in the income measure-for the rich top 0.1 % fathers and sons the elasticity is 0.466. Compared with Sweden, however, the intergenerational top income persistence is smaller in Denmark.