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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Measuring income gaps across family backgrounds is crucial for evaluating inequality and informing policy. I develop a multidimensional approach and apply it to Dutch administrative data with exceptionally rich information on parents and extended family. This approach reveals strikingly larger...

This paper examines earnings differences between first-generation and continuing generation college graduates across 24 OECD countries using data from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). In all but two of the countries analysed, first-generation graduates earn less than their peers from...

This paper exploits molecular genetic data to quantify genetic confounding in parent-child educational outcomes. We develop a model of the intergenerational transmission of education based on insights from the literature on social science genetics. The model distinguishes between two types of...

This paper is the first to show that intergenerational income mobility in Germany has decreased over time. We estimate intergenerational persistence for the birth cohorts 1968-1987 and find that it rises sharply for cohorts born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after which it stabilizes at a...

This study investigates the long-term effects of early-life health on intergenerational mobility in Brazil. Using the first cohort in Brazil, conducted in Ribeirão Preto city in 1978-79, linked to administrative income records, we study the effects of low birth weight on upward mobility and...

We assess intergenerational mobility in terms of education and income rank in five Latin American countries - Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Panama - by accounting for the education and occupation of both parents. Based on the Lubotsky and Wittenberg (2006) approach, we find that...

We use data from the Istanbul court registers spanning from the 16th-19th centuries to establish, for the first time, long-term trends in intergenerational mobility in a major premodern city. The dataset contains information on over 270,000 individuals who appeared in court in various roles,...

Among economists, empirical analysis of social mobility and the role of parental background is largely carried out in two separate strands of research. The intergenerational mobility literature estimates parent-child persistence in a certain outcome of interest, such as income. In contrast, the...

In this paper we estimate social mobility rates, free of measurement errors, using register data for Denmark and Sweden, 1968 to 2021. To correct for measurement error attenuation, we take ratios of the correlation of relatives at different locations in family trees, such as cousins relative to...

This paper is the first to provide estimates of intergenerational associations in mental health for a low- and middle-income country. Using rich mental health data on ~4,000 parent-child pairs in India, we find intergenerational associations in depression and anxiety scores to be 0.61 and 0.68,...

We provide the first estimates of broad-based health transmission between parents and their young children in India. The correlations between maternal health and child health outcomes - such as anemia, stunting, and body mass index - are approximately 0.20. When aggregating these health measures...

We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental...

This paper is the first to show that intergenerational income mobility in Germany has decreased over time. We provide estimates of intergenerational persistence for the birth cohorts 1968-1987 and document that the rank-rank slope rises sharply for cohorts born in the late 1970s and early 1980s,...

We employ distribution regression to estimate the joint distribution of two outcome variables conditional on covariates. Bivariate Distribution Regression (BDR) is particularly valuable when some dependence between the outcomes persists after accounting for the impact of the covariates. Our...

How do childhood environments contribute to intergenerational economic mobility? This paper explores the relative roles of family background (parents' wages, income, and wealth during the early years), and neighbourhoods (including access to services during childhood), in determining...

How did the US become a land of opportunity? We show that the country’s pioneering role in mass education was key. Unlike previous research, which has focused on father-son income correlations, we incorporate both parents in a new measure of intergenerational mobility that considers multiple...

This paper argues that relative measures of intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity are closely related ways of quantifying the inheritability of inequality. We review both literatures for Latin America, looking both at income and educational persistence. We document very high...

This paper proposes the application of an existing measure in a new context. Specifically, we adapt a measure originally proposed to characterize the degree of educational assortative mating to measure relative intergenerational mobility along the educational trait and inequality of opportunity....

This paper provides new insights on the importance of family background by linking 1.7 million Dutch children's incomes to an exceptionally rich set of family characteristics - including income, wealth, education, occupation, crime, and health. Using a machine learning approach, I show that...

Lacking lifetime income data, most intergenerational mobility estimates are subject to lifecycle bias. Using long income series from Sweden and the US, we illustrate that standard correction methods struggle to account for one important property of income processes: children from affluent...

We study the evolution of intergenerational educational mobility and related distributional statistics in Spain. Over recent decades, mobility has risen by one-third, coinciding with pronounced declines in inequality and assortative mating among the same cohorts. To explore these patterns, we...

This paper is the first to show that intergenerational income mobility in Germany has decreased over time. We estimate intergenerational persistence for the birth cohorts 1968-1987 and find that it rises sharply for cohorts born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after which it stabilizes at a...

This paper examines intergenerational mobility in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Russia during their transitions from central planning to market systems. We consider mobility as movement captured by changes in status between parents and children. We provide estimates of overall...

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of socio-emotional skills during childhood, using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) in the United Kingdom. This dataset enables us to measure two dimensions of socio-emotional development: internalising and externalising...

We reconstruct the genealogical tree of all individuals ever appearing in Dutch municipalities records since 1995. Using microdata from tax authorities, we compute a measure of their permanent earnings and assess the degree to which the intergenerational transmission process is heterogeneous....

We apply a partial identification analysis using comprehensive Norwegian register data to investigate the causal effect of father's income on child income. We find a strong association between the incomes of fathers and children. The causal effect, however, equals at least 1% and at most 51% of...

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of socio-emotional skills during childhood, using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) in the United Kingdom. This dataset enables us to measure two dimensions of socio-emotional development: internalising and externalising...

In today's world where growth and capital accumulation are the norm, many people still adhere to zero-sum thinking, the belief that gains for one party can only come at the expense of another party. The perception of economic exchange as zero-sum can lead to excessive competition and...