"Solon's (1992) landmark study estimated the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) in income between fathers and sons to be 0.4 or higher. This dramatically changed the consensus view of the U.S. as a highly mobile society. In this comment, I show both analytically and empirically how Solon and...

Traditional measures of intergenerational mobility such as the intergenerational elasticity are not useful for inferences concerning group differences in mobility with respect to the pooled income distribution. This paper uses transition probabilities and measures of "directional rank mobility"...

"Although it is well known that there is a strong association between education and health much less is known about how these factors are connected, and whether the relationship is causal. Lleras-Muney (2005) provides perhaps the strongest evidence that education has a causal effect on health....

Ideal estimates of the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) in income require a large panel of income data covering the entire working lifetimes for two generations. Previous studies have demonstrated that using short panels and covering only certain portions of the lifecycle can lead to...

We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps by linking children in the full count 1940 Census to 1) the universe of IRS tax data in 1974 and 1979 and 2) the long form 2000 Census. We use two identification strategies to estimate the potential...