The relationship between intergenerational mobility and equality of opportunity

Adrian Adermon (), Gunnar Brandén () and Martin Nybom ()
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Adrian Adermon: Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), UCLS, and UCFS
Gunnar Brandén: Center for Epidemiology and Community Medicine and Department of Global Public Health, Global and Sexual Health, Karolinska Institutet
Martin Nybom: Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), SOFI, and UCLS.

No 2025:2, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: Among economists, empirical analysis of social mobility and the role of parental background is largely carried out in two separate strands of research. The intergenerational mobility literature estimates parent-child persistence in a certain outcome of interest, such as income. In contrast, the equality of opportunity literature is rooted in a normative framework, and has only more recently started generating empirical evidence. Intergenerational mobility regressions are relatively straightforward to estimate, but their normative implications are less obvious. In contrast, measures of equality of opportunity have a policy-relelvant interpretation, but are demanding in terms of data, requiring the researcher to observe a large set of determinants of socioeconomic status for large samples. But maybe the two approaches capture similar underlying dynamics? We compare the two approaches by estimating both equality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility measures — as well as sibling correlations — across 16 birth cohorts within 126 Swedish local labor markets. Using these estimates, we test to what extent the different measures correlate, resulting in insights on the plausibility of interpreting intergenerational mobility measures as informative about equality of opportunity.

Keywords: Equality of opportunity; Intergenerational mobility; Sibling correlations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2025-03-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ltv
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