Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality

Diogo Britto (), Alexandre Fonseca (), Paolo Pinotti (), Breno Sampaio () and Lucas Warwar ()
Additional contact information
Diogo Britto: University of Milan Bicocca
Alexandre Fonseca: Federal Revenue of Brazil
Paolo Pinotti: Bocconi University
Breno Sampaio: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
Lucas Warwar: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

No 15611, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We provide the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility for a developing country, namely Brazil. We measure formal income from tax and employment registries, and we train machine learning models on census and survey data to predict informal income. The data reveal a much higher degree of persistence than previous estimates available for developed economies: a 10 percentile increase in parental income rank is associated with a 5.5 percentile increase in child income rank, and persistence is even higher in the top 5%. Children born to parents in the first income quintile face a 46% chance of remaining at the bottom when adults. We validate these estimates using two novel mobility measures that rank children and parents without the need to impute informal income. We document substantial heterogeneity in mobility across individual characteristics – notably gender and race – and across Brazilian regions. Leveraging children who migrate at different ages, we estimate that causal place effects explain 57% of the large spatial variation in mobility. Finally, assortative mating plays a strong role in household income persistence, and parental income is also strongly associated with several key long-term outcomes such as education, teenage pregnancy, occupation, mortality, and victimization.

Keywords: intergenerational mobility; inequality; Brazil; migration; place effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 I31 J62 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 89 pages
Date: 2022-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-lab and nep-lam
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality (2022)
Working Paper: Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality (2022)
Working Paper: Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality (2022)
Working Paper: Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality (2022)
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