This paper examines the similarity in wealth between parents and their children, and explores alternative explanations for this relationship. We find that the age-adjusted elasticity of child wealth with respect to parental wealth is 0.37, before the transfer of bequests. Lifetime income and...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this paper studies the degree to which spouses sort in the marriage market on the basis of parental wealth. We estimate a variety of models, including transition matrices, OLS and TSLS models to deal with measurement error in wealth...

In this paper, we find that the age-adjusted elasticity of child wealth with respect to parental wealth is 0.37 before the transfer of bequests. Lifetime income and asset ownership jointly explain nearly two-thirds of the wealth elasticity. Education, past parental transfers, and expected future...