Economic Journal最新文献

We construct comparable measures of intergenerational mobility (IM) for 103 Italian provinces using the methodology of Güell et al. (2007, 2015a) and explore their correlation with a variety of social and economic outcomes. We find that higher IM is positively associated with economic activity, education and social capital and negatively correlated with inequality. Moreover, there is no clear pattern of correlation with other socio-political variables. These results are qualitatively similar to Chetty et al. (2014), with the important difference that Italy is a highly centralised state where institutions and policies are ‘de jure’ the same in all provinces. This suggests that something beyond institutional and policy differences also shapes intergenerational mobility.

Recent work by Gregory Clark and co-authors uses a new surnames approach to examine intergenerational mobility, finding much higher persistence rates than traditionally estimated. Clark proposes a model of social mobility to explain the diverging estimates, including the crucial but untested hypothesis that traditional estimates of intergenerational persistence are biased downward because they use only one measure (e.g. earnings) of underlying status. I test for evidence of this using an approach from Lubotsky and Wittenberg (2006), incorporating information from multiple measures into an estimate of intergenerational persistence with the least attenuation bias. Contrary to Clark's prediction, I do not find evidence of substantial bias in prior estimates.

We use Danish wealth records from three decades to characterise wealth inequality in childhood, where the main source of wealth is transfers. Wealth holdings are small in childhood but they have strong predictive power for future wealth in adulthood. At age 18, asset holdings of children are more informative than parental wealth in predicting wealth of children when they are in their 40s. We investigate why and rule out that childhood wealth in itself can accumulate enough to explain later wealth inequality. Instead, childhood wealth seems to proxy for intergenerational correlation in savings behaviour and additional transfers from parents.

Was intergenerational economic mobility high in the early twentieth century in the US? Comparisons of mobility across time are complicated by the constraints of the data available. I match fathers from the Iowa State Census of 1915 to their sons in the 1940 Federal Census, the first state and federal censuses with data on income and years of education. I can estimate intergenerational mobility between 1915 and 1940 based on earnings, education, occupation, and names. Across all these measures, I document broad consensus that rates of persistence were low in Iowa in the early twentieth century.

This study estimates intergenerational wealth correlations across up to four generations and examines the degree to which the wealth association between parents and children can be explained by inheritances. Using a Swedish data set with newly hand-collected data on wealth and bequests, we find parent-child rank correlations of 0.3–0.4 and grandparent–grandchild rank correlations of 0.1–0.2. Bequests and gifts appear to be central in this process, accounting for at least half of the parent–child wealth correlation while earnings and education can account for only a quarter.