Family Trees and Falling Apples: Historical Intergenerational Mobility Estimates for Women and Men

Kasey Buckles, Joseph Price, Zachary Ward and Haley E.B. Wilbert

No 31918, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the US have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets linking parents to adult children, a challenge especially acute for women due to surname changes. We use a new dataset, the Census Tree, which incorporates genealogy data to link tens of millions of fathers to their sons and daughters in historical US censuses. We find that relative mobility was remarkably similar across sons and daughters in the 1835 to 1915 birth cohorts. Additionally, assortative mating was much stronger than previously estimated, as daughters married husbands with very similar backgrounds.

JEL-codes: I30 J0 N0 N01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-lab
Note: CH DAE LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31918.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:31918

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31918
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

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 ().