"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"...

This paper concerns the problem of inferring the effects of covariates on intergenerational income mobility, i.e. on the relationship between the incomes of parents and future earnings of their children. We focus on two different measures of mobility- (i) traditional transition probability of...

Chay, Guryan and Mazumder (2009) found substantial racial convergence in AFQT and NAEP scores across cohorts born in the 1960's and early 1970's that was concentrated among blacks in the South. We demonstrated a close tracking between variation in the test score convergence across states and...

Traditional measures of inter-generational mobility such as the inter-generational 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...

Lower intergenerational income mobility for blacks is a likely cause behind the persistent inter-racial gap in economic status in the US. However, few studies have analyzed black-white differences in intergenerational income mobility and the factors that determine these differences. This is...