We study the role of marriage for women's intergenerational mobility during the Ming-Qing (1368-1911) period. Using status information based on the timing of marriage from family histories in Central China, already in the early 1500s it is the case that daughters from rich families attain higher...

Based on responses in the General Social Survey, we construct an index that captures non-monetary qualities of occupations, such as respect, learning, and work hazards, relevant to the well-being of workers. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data,...

The current level and form of subsidization of college education is often rationalized by appeal to capital constraints on individuals. Because borrowing against human capital is difficult, capital constraints can lead to nonoptimal outcomes unless government intervenes. We develop a simple...

Argentina was the second largest destination country during the Age of Mass Migration, receiving nearly six million migrants. In this article, we first summarize recent findings characterizing migrants' long-term economic assimilation and their contributions to local economic development. The...

This paper demonstrates multiple beneficial impacts of a program promoting intergenerational mobility for disadvantaged African-American children and their children. The program improves outcomes of the first-generation treatment group across the life cycle, which translates into better family...

Poor post-secondary education infrastructure and opportunities partly explain the low higher education rates in developing countries. This paper estimates the effect of a program that improved post-secondary education infrastructure by building many university campuses across Uruguay. Leveraging...

Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the United States have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets that include information linking parents to their adult children. This problem has been especially acute for women, who are more difficult to link...

This paper analyzes the intergenerational mobility of immigrants. Using the 1940-1970 Censuses, the study reveals an important link between the earnings of immigrants and the earnings of their American-born children. Although there is some regression towards the mean, the earnings of...

This paper analyzes the extent to which ethnic skill differentials are transmitted across generations. I assume that ethnicity acts as an externality in the human capital accumulation process. The skills of the next generation depend on parental inputs and on the quality of the ethnic...

We examine intergenerational mobility (IM) in educational attainment in Africa since independence, using census data from 26 countries. First, we map and characterize the geography of IM. There is substantial variation both across and within countries with differences in literacy of the old...