Intergenerational Persistence Research Articles

The Decline in Intergenerational Mobility after 1980

Abstract Relative intergenerational mobility declined for cohorts born around 1960 compared to those born around 1950. The former entered the labor market after the rise in inequality around 1980 while the latter entered the labor market earlier. We show that the rank-rank slope rose from 0.25 to 0.36 and the intergenerational elasticity increased from 0.28 to 0.45. These increases are more pronounced for men than for women. Increases in returns to schooling and in the gradient in the likelihood of marriage by parent income are contributors to increased intergenerational persistence.

Intergenerational Persistence of Education, Smoking and Birth Weight: Evidence from Three Generations

Intergenerational Persistence of Education, Smoking and Birth Weight: Evidence from Three Generations

Shaping Inequality and Intergenerational Persistence of Poverty: Free College or Better Schools

Shaping Inequality and Intergenerational Persistence of Poverty: Free College or Better Schools

Intergenerational Mobility in American History: Accounting for Race and Measurement Error

A large body of evidence finds that relative mobility in the US has declined over the past 150 years. However, long-run mobility estimates are usually based on White samples and therefore do not account for the limited opportunities available for nonwhite families. Moreover, historical data measure the father’s status with error, which biases estimates toward greater mobility. Using linked census data from 1850 to 1940, I show that accounting for race and measurement error can double estimates of intergenerational persistence. Updated estimates imply that there is greater equality of opportunity today than in the past, mostly because opportunity was never that equal. (JEL J15, J62, N31, N32)

The intergenerational transmission of mental and physical health in the United Kingdom

As health is increasingly recognized as a key component of human welfare, a new line of research on intergenerational mobility has emerged that focuses on broad measures of health. We extend this research to consider two key components of health: physical health and mental health. We use rich survey data from the United Kingdom linking the health of adult children at around age 30 to their parents. We estimate that the rank–rank slope in health is 0.17 and the intergenerational health association is 0.19 suggesting relatively rapid mobility compared to other outcomes such as income. We find that while both mental and physical health have a similar degree of intergenerational persistence, parents’ mental health is much more strongly associated with broad measures of adult children’s health than parents’ physical health. We also show that the primacy of parent mental health over physical health on children’s health appears to emerge during early adolescence. Finally, we construct a comprehensive measure of welfare by combining income and health and estimate a rank–rank association of 0.27. This is considerably lower than the comparable estimate of 0.43 from the US suggesting that there is greater mobility in welfare in the UK than in the US.

Intergenerational income mobility in France: A comparative and geographic analysis

We provide new estimates of intergenerational income mobility in France for children born in the 1970s using rich administrative data. Since parents’ incomes are not observed, we employ a two-sample two-stage least squares estimation. We show, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, that this method slightly underestimates rank-based measures of intergenerational persistence. Our results suggest France is characterized by a strong persistence relative to other developed countries. 9.7% of children born to parents in the bottom 20% reach the top 20% in adulthood, four times less than children from the top 20%. We uncover substantial spatial variations in intergenerational mobility across departments, and a positive relationship between geographic mobility and intergenerational upward mobility. The expected income rank of individuals from the bottom of the parent income distribution who moved towards high-income departments is around the same as the expected income rank of individuals from the 75th percentile who stayed in their childhood department.

Occupational dualism and intergenerational educational mobility in the rural economy: evidence from China and India

We extend the Becker-Tomes model to a rural economy with farm-nonfarm occupational dualism to study intergenerational educational mobility in rural China and India. Using data free of coresidency bias, we find that fathers’ nonfarm occupation and education were complementary in determining sons schooling in India, but separable in China. Sons faced lower mobility in India irrespective of fathers’ occupation. Sensitivity analysis using the Altonji et al. (J. Polit. Econ. 113(1), 151–84, 2005) approach suggests that genetic correlations alone could explain the intergenerational persistence in China, but not in India. Farm-nonfarm differences in returns to education, and geographic mobility are plausible mechanisms behind the contrasting cross-country evidence.

Understanding Patterns and Trends in Income Mobility through Multiverse Analysis

Rising inequalities in rich countries have led to concerns that the economic ladder is getting harder to climb. Yet, research on trends in intergenerational income mobility finds conflicting results. To better understand this variation, we adopt a multiverse approach that estimates trends over 82,944 different definitions of income mobility, varying how and for whom income is measured. Our analysis draws on comprehensive register data for Swedish cohorts born 1958 to 1977 and their parents. We find that income mobility has declined, but for reasons neglected by previous research: improved gender equality in the labor market raises intergenerational persistence in women’s earnings and the household incomes of both men and women. Dominant theories that focus on childhood investments have blinded researchers to this development. Methodologically, we show how multiverse analysis can be used with abduction—inference to the best explanation—to improve theory-building in social science.

The impact of intergenerational income mobility on internal migration in China

AbstractThis study examines the impact of income mobility on internal migration across prefectures in China. We use income intergenerational persistence to evaluate income mobility and find that migrants prefer cities with higher income mobility. We further use the instrumental variable estimation and a set of robustness tests to verify the reliability of our findings. The influence is larger among women, the elderly, and the less‐educated, while the economic prosperity of destinations could relatively offset the negative effect of lower income mobility on migration. Additionally, higher mobility not only attracts but also retains migrants, hence benefiting the local economy. Through further exploration, we find that the real migration influencing factor underlying the higher income mobility is the higher job mobility, indicating that the real pursuit of Chinese migrants is the increased access to suitable job opportunities.

Parental transmissions of education for workers and poverty in Brazil

This article aimed to analyze empirically the parental transmission of education to workers employed in the labor market according to the socioeconomic status in Brazil. For this, Logit models were applied based on microdata from the 2014 Brazilian Household Sample Survey. The intergenerational reproduction of education for Brazilian workers and the heterogeneity between socioeconomic positions were validated. Among the poor, there is intergenerational persistence of lower education and low educational upward mobility between generations. On the other hand, among the non-poor, this parental maintenance of educational level is in high schooling. The parents' primary occupation and living in urban areas reduce the chances of reproducing the parents' educational legacy, while they increase for women, white people and those residing in developed regions. The results confirmed that the educational persistence for low-educated workers, greater for the poor, feeds the cycle of poverty and supports the maintenance of historical inequalities in the country.

Does social disadvantage persist over generations due to an uneven distribution of mental health diagnoses? A longitudinal investigation of Finnish register data

Social disadvantages persist over generations, while the mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission are not well understood. To fill this gap, first, we examine to what degree being diagnosed with a mental health disorder in adolescence mediate the transmission of social disadvantage. Second, we investigate whether the role of mental health varies for different outcomes. Third, we examine differences between disorder groups and gender.We exploited register data on the full Finnish population including information on mental health diagnoses (MHD) based on ICD-10 classification recorded in public specialized health care. As socioeconomic outcomes, we used offspring's (N = 511,835) records for low educational attainment, unemployment, and social assistance dependency in early adulthood. In addition to linear probability models, the g-computation method was used to simulate the degree to which reducing mental health inequalities in adolescence could narrow the differences between children of different family backgrounds.Our results show that adolescents with MHD had a higher likelihood of experiencing social disadvantage as young adults even after accounting for parental socioeconomic status and alternative health pathways. The counterfactual analysis indicated that the proportion mediated by unevenly distributed MHD was with 7.5% highest for social assistance followed by 4.2% for education and 3.2% for unemployment. The effect of mental health was modified by gender yet direction and strength varied across methods and externalizing behaviors mattered more for the intergenerational persistence than internalizing behaviors. Hypothetically reducing MHD to the level of families with high socioeconomic status might indeed lower part of the intergenerational transmission of social assistance dependency but to lesser degree of unemployment and low educational attainment. We demonstrate the need of support and services for those with MHD, especially among socially disadvantaged groups. However, social disadvantage should not be overly medicalized as family background has an important independent effect on offspring's socioeconimic outcomes.

Intergenerational mobility in the Netherlands: models, outcomes and trends

We reconstruct the genealogical tree of all individuals ever appearing in Dutch municipalities records starting in 1995. Combining microdata from tax authorities with education records we compute a measure of permanent income as well as education. We estimate the degree of intergenerational persistence in education and income in the population and across time, showing that it is higher than what previous estimates would suggest, albeit it appears to be decreasing. Finally, exploiting information on the education of grandparents, we estimate a model of intergenerational mobility in which endowments are transmitted through a latent factor. Estimates suggest an even higher persistence.

The importance of positional mobility for regional comparisons

In this paper, I show that the decomposition of intergenerational persistence indicators into their structural and positional components offers a clearer understanding of the determinants of heterogeneity in subnational mobility rates. This constitutes a departure from the current consensus in estimating mobility rates at the subnational level in economics. Applying this approach to the Mexican case, I show no significant differences in positional mobility across the country's regions. This contrasts with the existing results, particularly regarding intergenerational mobility in the country's southern region.

State Terror and Long-Run Development: The Persistence of the Khmer Rouge

Does mass repression have a long-term economic legacy, and if so, what explains persistence? I argue repression can undermine development by delimiting human capital. I study the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The regime implemented a campaign of violence to reorganize society, yet governing elites varied across the communist ideological spectrum. I exploit an arbitrary border that allocated villages to either the loyalist Mok or the relatively moderate Sy in Kampong Speu province. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find villages in the more extremist Southwest zone are poorer today compared with villages in the adjacent West zone, and had lower human capital immediately after the regime. Exposure to more intense repression shapes labor markets and child health, explaining intergenerational persistence. I find no conclusive evidence for other persistence channels. My findings add a novel pathway to the library of mechanisms which explain why historical coercion undermines development.

Intergenerational home ownership

This paper studies intergenerational links in home ownership, an increasingly important wealth marker and a measure of economic status in itself. Repeated cross sectional UK data show that home ownership rates have fallen rapidly over time, most markedly amongst younger people in more recent birth cohorts. Evidence from British birth cohorts data supplemented by the Wealth and Assets Survey show a significant rise through time in the intergenerational persistence of home ownership, as home ownership rates shrank disproportionately among those whose parents did not own their own home. Given the close connection between home ownership and wealth, these results on strengthening intergenerational persistence in home ownership are therefore also suggestive of a fall in intergenerational housing wealth mobility over time.

Intergenerational Persistence in Child Mortality

We study the intergenerational persistence of inequality by estimating grandmother-mother associations in the loss of a child, using pooled data from 119 Demographic and Health Surveys in 44 developing countries. Compared with compatriots of the same age, women with at least one sibling who died in childhood face 39 percent higher odds of having experienced at least one own-child death, or 7 percentage points at age 49. Place fixed effects reduce estimated mortality persistence by 47 percent; socioeconomic covariates explain far less. Within countries over time, persistence falls with aggregate child mortality, so that mortality decline disproportionately benefits high-mortality lineages. (JEL I12, J13, J16, J62, O15)

Intergenerational persistence of health: Evidence from India

Using nationally representative data, we estimate intergenerational mobility in health in India. Results from the instrumental variable method show that children of anemic mothers are more likely to be anemic, with an intergenerational health correlation of 0.26. Results are robust to the inclusion of confounding factors including the mother’s height. We find that the correlation between mothers’ anemic status and children’s anemic status differs by wealth quintile, indicating that economic status may play a role in the persistence of poor health across generations in developing countries.

Income-Based Affirmative Action in College Admissions

Abstract We study whether college admissions should implement quotas for lower-income applicants. We develop an overlapping-generation model and calibrate it to data from Brazil, where such a policy is widely implemented. In our model, parents choose how much to invest in their child’s education, thereby increasing both human capital and likelihood of college admission. We find that, in the long run, the optimal income-based affirmative action increases welfare and aggregate output. It improves the pool of admitted students, but distorts pre-college educational investments. The welfare-maximising policy benefits lower- to middle-income applicants with income-based quotas, while higher-income applicants face fiercer competition in college admissions. The optimal policy reduces intergenerational persistence of earnings by 5.7% and makes nearly 80% of households better off.

Intergenerational transmission of parental risky health behaviors in Chinese children: Are there socioeconomic status differences?

Risky health behaviors in childhood, including smoking, alcohol consumption, and having a poor diet, are the major sources of non-communicable diseases in adulthood. This study aimed to examine how parents affect children's risky health behaviors and whether intergenerational transmission differs based on socioeconomic status (SES). Data were extracted from the 1991-2015 China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). Smoking (n = 5,946), alcohol consumption (n = 7,821), and sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) consumption (n = 3,537) were used as proxies for risky health behaviors in children. A binary choice model for panel data with a random-effect specification was employed to examine whether risky health behaviors can be transmitted from parents to their children. Subsequently, we conducted a seemingly unrelated estimation test (SUEST) to explore the differences in parental transmission between the different SES groups. We found strong intergenerational persistence of smoking, alcohol drinking, and SSBs drinking behaviors, except for the mothers' smoking behavior. Mothers had a greater influence on children's alcohol drinking and SSBs drinking behaviors than fathers both in urban and rural areas and in different SES groups. The intergenerational transmission of SSBs drinking behavior exhibited a decreasing trend with increasing SES for both urban and rural families. In urban areas, mothers' alcohol drinking behavior has a decreasing trend with increasing education level, occupation, and income; however, in rural areas, the influence of mothers' alcohol drinking behavior occurred in the same direction with increasing education level and occupation type. In rural areas, the influence of fathers' drinking and smoking behaviors on children appears to mostly increase with increasing SES. Meanwhile, the influence of such behaviors among urban fathers would decrease with increasing SES. Parents' behaviors and SES can influence the initiation of risky health behaviors in their offspring. Thus, to promote healthy behaviors, policymakers can introduce health education programs for parents, particularly for those living in rural areas and with a low SES.

Intergenerational Persistence of Health: Evidence from India

Intergenerational Persistence of Health: Evidence from India