Constantines and Duffie (1996) show that for Idiosyncratic risk to matter for asset pricing the shocks must (i) be highly persistent and (ii) become more volatile during economic contractions. We show that data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) are consistent with these...

We propose a new methodology for measuring intergenerational mobility in economic wellbeing. Our method is based on the joint distribution of surnames and economic outcomes. It circumvents the need for intergenerational panel data, a long-standing stumbling block for understanding mobility. A...