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  5. Intergenerational Mobility
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Intergenerational Mobility

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)

Convention Center, 225D
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Bhashkar Mazumder, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Like Mother, Like Child? The Rise of Women’s Intergenerational Income Persistence in Sweden and the United States

Gunnar Brandén
,
Center for Epidemiology and Community Medicine
Martin Nybom
,
Uppsala University
Kelly Vosters
,
University of North Carolina-Charlotte

Abstract

We show how intergenerational mobility has evolved over time in Sweden and the United States since 1985, focusing on prime-age labor incomes of both men and women. Income persistence involving women (daughters and/or mothers) has risen substantially over recent decades in both Sweden and the US, while the more predominantly studied father-son measures remained roughly stable. Interestingly, mother-son and mother-daughter persistence levels are very similar as they rise through the sample period, also to nearly the same levels in both countries, contrary to well-established elevated levels of persistence in the US relative to Sweden. We develop a model to quantify the relative roles of parent human capital, employment, and (residual) income, as well as assortative mating. Despite very similar trends and levels for mothers in the US and Sweden, we find substantial differences in the roles of employment and assortative mating over time, consistent with the staggered timing in women’s spike in labor force attachment. Parental assortative mating is also an important factor in both countries, though negative sorting on (residual) income in the US negates the upward influence of positive human capital sorting, lending to the similar cross-country levels of mother-child persistence.

Family Trees and Falling Apples: Intergenerational Mobility Estimates from U.S. Genealogy Data

Kasey Buckles
,
University of Notre Dame
Joseph Price
,
Brigham Young University
Zachary Ward
,
Baylor University
Haley Wilbert
,
University of Notre Dame

Abstract

Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the United States have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets that include information on both parents and their adult children. This problem has been especially acute for women, who are more difficult to link because their surnames often change between childhood and adulthood. In this paper, we use a new dataset, the Census Tree, that overcomes these issues by building on information from an online genealogy platform. Users of the platform have private information that allows them to create links among the 1850 to 1940 decennial censuses; the Census Tree combines these links with others obtained using traditional linking methods to produce a dataset with hundreds of millions of census-to-census links, nearly half of which are for women. With these data, we produce estimates of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status from fathers to their sons and daughters. We find that for married men and women, the patterns of mobility over this period are similar, though marriage emerges as an engine of mobility for women in later cohorts as assortative mating declines. Single women, however, are less mobile than their male counterparts.

Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the 20th Century

Elisa Jácome
,
Northwestern University
Ilyana Kuziemko
,
Princeton University
Suresh Naidu
,
Columbia University

Abstract

We estimate long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for representative samples of the U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that include father’s occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show that mobility increases between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts and that the decline of Black-white income gaps explains about half of this rise. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly women, considerably overstates the level of mobility for twentieth-century birth cohorts while simultaneously understating its increase between the 1910s and 1940s.

U.S. Educational Mobility in the Twentieth Century

Martha Bailey
,
University of California-Los Angeles and NBER
A.R. Shariq Mohammed
,
Northeastern University
Paul Mohnen
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Abstract

This paper describes the geography of intergenerational educational mobility for both men and women born in the 20th century and its local correlates. We use supervised machine-learning to link 1.7 million men and women in the Social Security Application Records to the full-count 1940 Census, while keeping Type I linking error rates very low, and reweight the linked sample to resemble the national population. We find that the geography of educational mobility was broadly similar to the geography of income mobility, with the highest rates of mobility in the Northeast and the West of the country and the lowest rates of mobility in the South. Counties with high rates of mobility had (i) lower income inequality, (ii) higher community-level literacy rates, (iii) higher levels of economic development, and (iv) greater public good provision. The geography and the correlates of educational mobility were similar for men and women.

Discussant(s)
Jonathan Rothbaum
,
U.S. Census Bureau
Peter Z. Lin
,
University of California-Los Angeles
Maggie R. Jones
,
U.S. Census Bureau
Matthew Staiger
,
Opportunity Insights
JEL Classifications
  • J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers
  • J1 - Demographic Economics