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...

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 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...

We develop a model that links education-outcome gradients to intergenerational transmission, distinguishing joint from parent-specific channels under assortative mating. Using Danish administrative data on family quartets, we estimate the own education-outcome gradient and, in addition,...

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 estimate intergenerational earnings persistence for 6 ethnic groups using linked administrative data for approximately 288,000 individuals in New Zealand born between 1986 and 1992. Linking data from administrative datasets, censuses, and surveys, we focus on 198,000 parent-child pairs...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

Rank-rank regression is commonly employed in economic research as a way of capturing the relationship between two economic variables. It frequently features in studies of intergenerational mobility as the resulting coefficient, capturing the rank correlation between the variables, is easy to...

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...

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...

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...

The strong evidence in support of the Great Gatsby Curve (i.e. the negative cross-sectional relationship between intergenerational mobility and inequality) seems to be at odds with the fact that large increases in inequality in the US have not resulted in decreases in mobility. We tackle this...

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 introduces a new global database with estimates of intergenerational income mobility for 87 countries, covering 84 percent of the world's population. This marks a notable expansion of the cross-country evidence base on income mobility, particularly among low- and middle-income...

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...

We provide new evidence on intergenerational social mobility among immigrants and natives in France. Using linked parent–child data from censuses, we introduce an individual-level metric - the Intergenerational Rank Difference (IRD) - that measures upward and downward mobility relative to the...

Education is an important tool used to equip knowledge and pursue self-improvement, which may affect intergenerational social class mobility through human capital accumulation. Using 8014 mixed cross-section samples from the 2017, 2018 and 2021 China General Social Survey (CGSS), an...