Social Mobility: The Barro-Becker Children Meet the Laitner-Loury Dynasties

Fernando Alvarez

Review of Economic Dynamics, 1999, vol. 2, issue 1, 65-103

Abstract: I compare the predictions of two types of dynastic models for the persistence of wealth across generations: models that focus on uninsurable risk and intergenerational consumption smoothing but abstract from the fertility decision, such as Loury [1981] and Laitner [1992], and models without risk that focus on the fertility decision, such as Becker and Barro [1988]. I show that when both uninsurable risk and fertility decisions are present, a striking result obtains: wealthier parents have more children, but the transfer to each child is independent of wealth. Since this result is counterfactual, I also discuss extensions that can resurrect persistence. (Copyright: Elsevier)

Keywords: fertility; intergenerational transfers; bequest; persistence; dynamic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 D1 D31 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/redy.1998.0052 Full text (application/pdf)
Access to full texts is restricted to ScienceDirect subscribers and ScienceDirect institutional members. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/ for details.

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:red:issued:v:2:y:1999:i:1:p:65-103

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.economic ... ription-information/

DOI: 10.1006/redy.1998.0052

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economic Dynamics is currently edited by Loukas Karabarbounis

More articles in Review of Economic Dynamics from Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().