Estimates of intergenerational mobility in lifetime income derived from incomplete histories routinely incorporate the estimation process, necessary life-cycle adjustments to annual data. The two-stage method presented here first estimates proxies for fathers’ and sons’ family incomes observations, schooling race; then uses these derive measures. Applying this United States PSID data sons born ...

Intergenerational Earnings Mobility among the Children of Canadian Immigrants We analyze the intergenerational income mobility of Canadians born to immigrants using the 2001 Census. A detailed portrait of the Canadian population is offered as are estimates of the degree of generational mobility among the children of immigrants from 70 countries. The degree of persistence as estimated in regress...

Policy makers in both Europe and North America often imagine a " new " economy—an economy based upon human capital and skills—as the source of economic growth, and are increasingly concerned with the extent to which all members of their societies are able to participate and experience a rising standard of living. " Access, " " social inclusion, " and " equality of opportunity " are the terms by...

The twin starting points for this paper are recent discussions in economic theory concerning the normative foundations for indices of intergenerational mobility, and the development of a human capital score intended (in conjunction with a parallel measure of individual wealth) to act as an indicator of social class. The paper specifies an intergenerational Gini-type mobility index, based on the...

The paper compares the extent of intergenerational earnings and educational correlation in Japan and France. It uses very similar repeated surveys that provide information on educational attainment and family background, conducted in Japan and France. To insure comparability, similar sample restrictions and specifications are imposed. For Japan, we use waves 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995 and 2005. For...

Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility Families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child’s opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background. Cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers will most likely lower the degree of intergenerational earnings mobility for ...

Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility that use point in time measures of income and earnings suffer from lifecycle and attenuation bias. We consider these issues for the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and British Cohort Study (BCS) for the first time, highlighting how common methods used to deal with these biases do not eradicate these issues. To attempt to overcome this, we...

This paper formulates a structural dynamic programming model of preschool investment choices of altruistic parents and then empirically estimates the structural parameters of the model using the NLSY79 data. The paper finds that preschool investment significantly boosts cognitive and non-cognitive skills, which enhance earnings and school outcomes. It also finds that a standard Mincer earnings ...