In this paper we estimate social mobility rates, free of measurement errors, using register data for Denmark and Sweden, 1968 to 2021. To correct for measurement error attenuation, we take ratios of the correlation of relatives at different locations in family trees, such as cousins relative to...

We use data from the Istanbul court registers spanning from the 16th-19th centuries to establish, for the first time, long-term trends in intergenerational mobility in a major premodern city. The dataset contains information on over 270,000 individuals who appeared in court in various roles,...

Among economists, empirical analysis of social mobility and the role of parental background is largely carried out in two separate strands of research. The intergenerational mobility literature estimates parent-child persistence in a certain outcome of interest, such as income. In contrast, the...

This paper is the first to provide estimates of intergenerational associations in mental health for a low- and middle-income country. Using rich mental health data on ~4,000 parent-child pairs in India, we find intergenerational associations in depression and anxiety scores to be 0.61 and 0.68,...

How did the US become a land of opportunity? We show that the country’s pioneering role in mass education was key. Unlike previous research, which has focused on father-son income correlations, we incorporate both parents in a new measure of intergenerational mobility that considers multiple...

We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental...

We provide the first estimates of broad-based health transmission between parents and their young children in India. The correlations between maternal health and child health outcomes - such as anemia, stunting, and body mass index - are approximately 0.20. When aggregating these health measures...

We assess intergenerational mobility in terms of education and income rank in five Latin American countries - Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Panama - by accounting for the education and occupation of both parents. Based on the Lubotsky and Wittenberg (2006) approach, we find that...

This paper exploits molecular genetic data to quantify genetic confounding in parent-child educational outcomes. We develop a model of the intergenerational transmission of education based on insights from the literature on social science genetics. The model distinguishes between two types of...

This paper is the first to show that intergenerational income mobility in Germany has decreased over time. We provide estimates of intergenerational persistence for the birth cohorts 1968-1987 and document that the rank-rank slope rises sharply for cohorts born in the late 1970s and early 1980s,...

This paper provides new insights on the importance of family background by linking 1.7 million Dutch children's incomes to an exceptionally rich set of family characteristics - including income, wealth, education, occupation, crime, and health. Using a machine learning approach, I show that...

This paper examines intergenerational mobility in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Russia during their transitions from central planning to market systems. We consider mobility as movement captured by changes in status between parents and children. We provide estimates of overall...

We employ distribution regression to estimate the joint distribution of two outcome variables conditional on covariates. Bivariate Distribution Regression (BDR) is particularly valuable when some dependence between the outcomes persists after accounting for the impact of the covariates. Our...

Measuring income gaps across family backgrounds is crucial for evaluating inequality and informing policy. I develop a multidimensional approach and apply it to Dutch administrative data with exceptionally rich information on parents and extended family. This approach reveals strikingly larger...

This paper examines earnings differences between first-generation and continuing generation college graduates across 24 OECD countries using data from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). In all but two of the countries analysed, first-generation graduates earn less than their peers from...

This paper argues that relative measures of intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity are closely related ways of quantifying the inheritability of inequality. We review both literatures for Latin America, looking both at income and educational persistence. We document very high...

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of socio-emotional skills during childhood, using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) in the United Kingdom. This dataset enables us to measure two dimensions of socio-emotional development: internalising and externalising...

There is a clear consensus that childhood experiences shape adult success, yet there is limited understanding of their impact on future generations. We proxy parental investments during childhood with birth order and study whether disadvantages due to lower investments are transmitted to future...

We combine the Decennial Census, credit reports, and administrative earnings to create the first panel dataset linking parent's credit access to the labor market outcomes of children in the U.S.We find that a 10% increase in parent's unused revolving credit during their children's adolescence...

Recent studies use names - first and surnames - to estimate intergenerational mobility in sources that lack direct family links. While generating novel evidence on intergenerational transmission processes, it remains unclear how different estimators compare and how reliable they are. This paper...

Children early in the birth order get more parental care than later children. Does this significantly affect their life chances? An extensive genealogy of 428,280 English people 1680-2024, with substantial sets of complete families, suggests that birth order had little effect on social outcomes...

In today's world where growth and capital accumulation are the norm, many people still adhere to zero-sum thinking, the belief that gains for one party can only come at the expense of another party. The perception of economic exchange as zero-sum can lead to excessive competition and...

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, looking across generations, elite colleges do both. Lower-status individuals...

Across all education levels, policymakers are using the re-sorting of students to diversify the socioeconomic composition of student bodies. We study how these integration policies interact, using a heterogeneous agent overlapping generations model featuring multiple periods of human capital...

We apply a partial identification analysis using comprehensive Norwegian register data to investigate the causal effect of father's income on child income. We find a strong association between the incomes of fathers and children. The causal effect, however, equals at least 1% and at most 51% of...

We estimate intergenerational mobility of education for people born 1940-1999 at the subnational level for 40 European countries. The result is a panel of mobility indices for 105 mesoregions (NUTS1), and 215 microregions (NUTS2). We use these indices to make three contributions. First, we...

The nineteenth-century American family experienced tremendous demographic, economic, and institutional changes. By using birth order effects as a proxy for family environment, and linked census data on men born between 1835 and 1910, we study how the family's role in human capital production...

The nineteenth-century American family experienced tremendous demographic, economic, and institutional changes. By using birth order effects as a proxy for family environment, and linked census data on men born between 1835 and 1910, we study how the family's role in human capital production...

This paper studies the long-run effects of concertaje, a forced labor system from the Spanish colonial era in Ecuador that coerced indigenous workers in rural estates after indebting them. I collected and digitized historical tax records (1800) and connected them to contemporary ones (2010s) via...

This paper presents new evidence on schooling mobility across three generations in six Latin American countries. By combining survey information with national census data, we have constructed a novel dataset that includes 50,000 triads of grandparents, parents, and children born between 1890 and...

We assess the hypothesis that declining intergenerational economic mobility in Norway is attributable to a rising signaling value of education accompanied by more overeducation particularly among upperclass offspring. We identify five empirical facts that together point in this direction: •...

How strong is the transmission of socio-economic status across generations in Latin America? To answer this question, we first review the empirical literature on intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity for the region, summarizing results for both income and educational outcomes....

A key measure of equality of opportunity is intergenerational mobility. Of particular interest is the extent to which children of immigrants catch up with natives. Using administrative data for the Netherlands, we find large gaps in the absolute income mobility of immigrants relative to natives...

We reconstruct the genealogical tree of all individuals ever appearing in Dutch municipalities records since 1995. Using microdata from tax authorities, we compute a measure of their permanent earnings and assess the degree to which the intergenerational transmission process is heterogeneous....

We apply a partial identification analysis using comprehensive Norwegian register data to investigate the causal effect of father’s income on child income. We find a strong association between the incomes of fathers and children. The causal effect, however, equals at least 1% and at most 51%...

We suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess relative inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes, such as (continuous) earnings or (discrete and ordinal) education levels, and captures dynastic improvements of such outcomes at different points of the initial...