Intergenerational Mobility, Siblings' Inequality and Borrowing Constraints

Alejandro Gaviria

University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC San Diego

Abstract: This paper uncovers differences in social mobility between rich and poor families. The paper shows, in particular, that borrowing constraints retard social mobility among the poor by preventing poor parents from investing optimally in the their children's human capital. This evidence contradicts several recent studies that argue that innate ability is the overriding determinant of socioeconomic success in the United States. The paper also shows that siblings' inequality seems to be independent of family wealth, which clearly contradicts the predictions of most economic models of resource allocation within the family

Keywords: social mobility; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998-05-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/8x16c72b.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Intergenerational mobility, sibling inequality and borrowing constraints (2002)
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:cdl:ucsdec:qt8x16c72b

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC San Diego Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().