African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility Since 1880

William Collins and Marianne Wanamaker ()

No 23395, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We document the intergenerational mobility of black and white American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new historical datasets for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and combining them with modern data to cover the middle and late twentieth century. We find large disparities in mobility, with white children having far better chances of escaping the bottom of the distribution than black children in every generation. This mobility gap was more important in proximately determining each generation’s racial gap than was the initial gap in parents’ economic status.

JEL-codes: J15 J62 N31 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his, nep-lab and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Published as William J. Collins & Marianne H. Wanamaker, 2022. "African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility since 1880," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, vol 14(3), pages 84-117.

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