Intergenerational Mobility in Uruguay Using Income-Tax Administrative Data

Martin Leites (), Xavier Ramos (), Rodríguez, Cecilia () and Vilá, Joan ()
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Martin Leites: Instituto de Economía, Universidad de la República
Xavier Ramos: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Rodríguez, Cecilia: Instituto de Economía, Universidad de la República
Vilá, Joan: Instituto de Economía, Universidad de la República

No 18642, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: We contribute to the very incipient literature that estimates the intergenerational mobility of income from large-scale administrative data using high-quality income data and provide novel evidence of intergenerational income mobility in a middle-income country, Uruguay. Our estimates address the important role of informal labor markets, one of the features of low- and middle-income countries, and a major challenge to obtain unbiased estimates of intergenerational mobility in these countries. We estimate an IRA of 0.292, indicating that persistence is higher in Uruguay than in high-income countries, but lower than in the US. Our results show that (i) informal income increases intergenerational persistence, (ii) intergenerational persistence is higher at the upper half of the distribution, especially at the richest decile, and (iii) intergenerational income persistence is largest among parents and children of the same sex.

Keywords: intergenerational income mobility; informal labor markets; Uruguay; non-linearities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 E26 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-iue and nep-lam
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