Immobility As Memory: Some New Approaches to Characterizing Intergenerational Persistence via Markov Chains

Lawrence Blume, Neil A. Cholli, Steven Durlauf and Aleksandra Lukina

No 33166, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper proposes some new measures of intergenerational persistence based on the idea of characterizing the memory of origin in the stochastic process that links the socioeconomic classes of parents and children. We introduce “memory curves” for all future generations given any initial condition of class for a family dynasty, which reveal how initial conditions interact with the transition process between parents and children to create mobility and persistence. We also propose ways to aggregate information across different classes to produce overall characterizations of mobility in the population. To illustrate our measures, we estimate occupational “memory curves” using U.S. survey data. Our findings show that, on average, the memory of initial conditions dissipates largely within three generations, though there is meaningful heterogeneity in mobility rates across dynasties originating from different occupational classes.

JEL-codes: C10 C50 D30 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-11
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