Families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child's opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background. Cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers will most likely lower the degree of...

The phenomenon of systemic changes in the fortunes of social groups is hard to reconcile with traditional macroeconomic models of intergenerational mobility. This paper, therefore, proposes a theory of endogenous reversal of fortune, whereby instilling strict work norms is an instrument to...

We examine how intergenerational income mobility responds to structural changes in a simple theoretical model of intergenerational transmission, deviating from the existing literature by explicitly analyzing the transition path between steady states. We find that mobility depends not only on...

We estimate the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) of income for the Netherlands using complete population data for around 177,000 28-year olds. We find that IGEs are much lower when actual individual income data are used rather than proxies or aggregates for income. Though low, daughters' IGEs...

Are the United States still a land of opportunity? We provide new insights on this question by invoking a novel measurement approach that allows us to target the joint distribution of income and wealth. We show that inequality of opportunity has increased by 77% over the time period 1983-2016....

We conduct the first dedicated study of absolute income mobility in Australia, for 1950-2019. About two-thirds of 30-34 year-olds have higher real incomes than their parents did at the same age, and this has been stable for 25 years. This is among the highest levels of absolute mobility in the...

We present the first estimates of intergenerational wealth correlation for Australia, using HILDA. The rank correlation varies greatly by child age when wealth is observed, from 0.1 before age 30, to 0.5 after age 40. Most children in our estimation sample are young. For these children overall,...

A key measure of equality of opportunity is intergenerational mobility. Of particular interest is the extent to which children of immigrants catch up with natives. Using administrative data for the Netherlands, we find large gaps in the absolute income mobility of immigrants relative to natives...

We provide the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility for a developing country, namely Brazil. We measure formal income from tax and employment registries, and we train machine learning models on census and survey data to predict informal income. The data reveal a much higher...

We evaluate a temporary public sector employment program targeted at individuals with weak labor market attachment, applying dynamic inverse probability weighting to account for dynamic selection. We show that the program is successful in increasing employment and reducing social assistance....