Are children better off than their parents? This highly debated question in politics and economics is investigated by analysing the trends in absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility for Germany and the US. High quality panel data is used for this purpose; the SOEP for...

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 BCS cohort and also to explore the...

Our objective is to obtain an accurate estimate of the degree of intergenerational income mobility in Canada. We use income tax information on about 400,000 father-son pairs, and find intergenerational earnings elasticities to be about 0.2. Earnings mobility tends to be slightly greater than...

Using the NLSY79 and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults datasets, this paper formulates, provides conditions for parametric and non-parametric identification and empirically estimates the parameters of an altruistic model of parental preschool investment within a structural dynamic programming...

We investigate the hypothesis of failed integration and low social mobility of immigrants. An intergenerational assimilation model is tested empirically on household survey data and validated against registry data provided by the Italian Embassy in Germany. Although we confirm substantial...

This paper explores the perceptions of inequality and their associations with social mobility exploiting the ISSP and LiTS cross-country data sets. These perceptions vary across countries as well as across individuals within countries. We try to explain this variation by examining the diverse...

This paper uses a dynastic model of household behavior to estimate and decomposed the correlations in earnings across generations. The estimate model can explain 75% to 80% of the observed correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and families across...

The prospects for the next generation—whether young people, regardless of their backgrounds, have equal chances of social success—pose a momentous problem for modern societies. Inequality of opportunity, often reflected by social immobility, is a threat to the egalitarian promise and the...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...