The Great Escape: Intergenerational Mobility in the United States Since 1940

Nathaniel Hilger

No 21217, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: I develop a method to estimate intergenerational mobility (IM) in education on large cross-sectional surveys and apply the method to U.S. census data from 1940 to 2000. The method estimates IM directly for children age 26-29 who still live with parents and adjusts for independent children using a procedure that I validate extensively. Estimates imply large post-1940 gains in IM that were (1) driven primarily by large IM gains in the South for both whites and blacks, (2) larger for blacks due to their greater concentration in the South, and (3) driven by high school rather than college enrollment.

JEL-codes: J1 J24 J62 N01 N3 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-his and nep-lma
Note: CH DAE ED LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21217.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21217

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21217

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().