Using unique administrative data that link privately held firm owners to rich background information, we provide novel evidence on underage children as firm owners. Ownership occurs at all ages 0--17, with a mean age of 12. Childhood ownership is strongly concentrated among high-income families,...

Income shocks and limited upward mobility can undermine people's well-being and economic prospects. Most cross-country studies on income mobility over people's lives rely on survey data, but small samples limit detailed analysis by socio-demographic group or segment of the distribution. This...

Using Social Security records between 2000 and 2020, we provide a comprehensive analysis of labor earnings inequality and its dynamics over the course of Lithuania’s economic development. Since 2000, there has been a substantial decline in earnings inequality, largely driven by the rapid...

This paper studies intergenerational income mobility using register data for 630,000 Danish children and their parents. We document substantial mobility differences across parents' income levels. Decomposing the mobility estimates shows that for children from low income families,...

To what extent did class shape political behavior during early democratization and industrialization, and did class voting reflect economic interests or durable political identities? We use newly collected individual-level panel data from open-ballot elections in the nineteenth-century...

We estimate the long-term intergenerational mobility (IM) in Brazil, by mesoregion, utiliz ing the methodology developed by Güell, Mora and Telmer (2015) and Güell et al. (2018). Benefiting from the unique features of Brazil, such as data availability on income, edu cation, full names, our...

South Africa's education system remains shaped by a legacy of colonialism and apartheid, with persistent racial disparities in attainment despite multiple post-1994 reforms. Using wave 5 of the National Income Dynamics Study, this paper examines intergenerational education mobility across...

This report presents findings from the Myanmar INsights on Graduate Aspirations and Labor Activity (MINGALA) Panel Survey conducted in 2024 and 2025, tracking the aspirations, labor market experiences, and migration intentions of tertiary-educated youth ages 20–45. Against the backdrop of...

Housing is the largest capital asset for most families. While the intergenerational mobility literature has extensively studied the income distribution, it has devoted less attention to housing, in part due to data limitations. We document 3 features of intergenerational mobility by comparing...

We examine optimal government education expenditure policies in the form of cash transfers to school-aged children, with the objectives of enhancing intergenerational income mobility and reducing the skill premium. Using a calibrated overlapping generations (OLG) model tailored to recent...

This paper describes a new public-access online database containing internationally comparable estimates of inequality of opportunity for seventy-two countries, covering two-thirds of the world's population. The estimates were computed directly from the unit-record microdata for 196 household...

Africa remains the poorest and one of the most unequal regions globally, with limited upward mobility and strong intergenerational persistence of disadvantage. Child health is a key channel of transmission, shaping later outcomes in education, labour force participation, and earnings. This paper...

Integrating administrative data from the civil registry, social security, and national censuses, we provide novel evidence on intergenerational income mobility and equality of opportunity among 514,890 formal workers in Ecuador. Our results show substantial intergenerational mobility (rank-rank...

We investigate the effects of 4-year public historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on social mobility of nearby Black and White children. To identify a causal effect, we use the historical fact that many HBCUs began as normal schools to train Black teachers, and we argue that the...

There is continued debate, with important social consequences, about how social status is transmitted between parents and children. In particular, how much does genetics as opposed to social causation matter? In an ingenious recent article, Collado et al. (2023), using an extended family lineage...

Standard intergenerational measures have been shown to understate the long-run persistence of socioeconomic advantages in developed countries. We study theoretically and empirically whether this pattern extends to less developed settings, using Indonesia as a case study. Using the Indonesian...

The government is in the process of conducting a review of universal credit (UC), the main means-tested benefit for working-age people, received by 6.3 million families at any one time. This report discusses some of the challenges UC faces, and outlines potential directions for reform.

Reliable statistics on the distribution of wealth - and how this has changed over time - are essential for informing a range of policy debates. Unfortunately, current official statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) do not provide a coherent or consistent guide to how wealth is...

The IFS Deaton Review has been a major interdisciplinary project studying the causes and consequences of inequalities. The Review has studied inequalities related to education, health, income, wealth, political power, geography, gender, ethnicity and social mobility. This report draws lessons...

How did the US become a land of opportunity? Previous historical research on intergenerational mobility has focused on father-son income correlations, masking the role of mothers. We introduce a new mobility measure that incorporates both parents’ human capital, develop a latent variable...

The risk of a worker falling into unemployment represents one of the most important threats to the stability of households' finances - both in terms of lower spending (and hence living standards) and in terms of a greater degree of financial distress (such as the accumulation of unmanageable...

More than 1.5 million staff work for the NHS in England, across a wide range of occupations. Progression within these occupations - for example, from nurse to senior staff nurse - has long been a focus of workforce policy in the NHS. Transitions between broad occupation groups - such as...

We compare wealth taxes and capital gains taxes in a random growth model with idiosyncratic investment risk. At equal tax revenue, wealth taxes generate higher wealth inequality but also higher wealth mobility than capital gains taxes. The mechanism operates through variance: wealth taxes shift...

Aktuelle Transformationsprozesse erzeugen erhebliche Anpassungserfordernisse an den Arbeitsmärkten: Qualifizierung und Weiterbildung sollen dazu beitragen, neu entstehende Qualifikationsanforderungen zu decken, (Fach-)Kräfteengpässe zu entschärfen, Arbeitslosen und Geringqualifizierten Wege...

We construct two new large-scale datasets to measure relative and upward educational mobility by sex, race, class, and childhood county of residence for cohorts born in 1910-1919 and 1982-1997. We show that both relative and upward educational mobility rose over the 20th century, with...

We investigate the role of South African higher education institutions in promoting intergenerational social mobility using a newly linked administrative dataset of university students and secondary school completers. We measure mobility as the share of graduates from lower-income secondary...

We propose a simple and flexible framework to assess relative intergenerational mobility. The approach defines a dynasty as a parent-child pair, measuring achievement by each individual's rank within their own generational outcome distribution, and mobility by the change in this rank across...

We study intragenerational wealth rank mobility, investigating three dimensions: (i) wealth mobility over the life cycle, (ii) heterogeneity in mobility among subgroups and wealth components, and (iii) commonalities and differences across divergent country contexts. We use data from Germany...

This paper examines whether Ghana's education reforms have increased intergenerational education mobility. Using the newly constructed Ghana Education and Labour Series-a harmonized dataset combining multiple rounds of the Ghana Living Standards Survey-we track intergenerational education...

This study examines the career aspirations of economically disadvantaged Filipino children participating in the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), the Philippines' flagship conditional cash transfer program. Using data from 9,958 children aged 10 to 25 collected through the Fourth Wave...

This paper examines the geography of intergenerational income mobility in South Africa across districts and metropolitan municipalities as well as historically disadvantaged former-homelands. South Africa's high inequality has a geographical dimension (spatial inequality), shaped by a long...

This article investigates whether capital or labor income drives overall relative income mobility. To this aim, we use Norwegian income registers covering 293,875 individuals over 26 years. A new framework decomposes total income mobility into capital and labor components across the life cycle....

This paper examines the role of sibling sex composition as a potential explanation of the transmission of parental advantages to the next generation. The presence of a brother affects the family environment and parents' decisions, influencing the siblings' labour market outcomes in the long...

The literature on intergenerational mobility for many countries in the world focus on household surveys that capture the education of parents and their children. While they pay particular attention to issues regarding co-residency of fathers and son, they are somewhat weaker in information on...