Does Intergenerational Mobility Increase Corporate Profits?

James F. Albertus and Michael Smolyansky
Additional contact information
Michael Smolyansky: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/michael-smolyansky.htm

No 2019-081, Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: We find that firms located in areas with higher intergenerational mobility are more profitable. Building off the work of Chetty and Hendren (2018a and 2018b)?who provide measures of intergenerational mobility for all commuting zones (essentially, metropolitan areas) within the U.S.?we are the first to show the positive association between intergenerational mobility and corporate profitability. Our regressions compare firms in the same industry at the same point in time and fully control for time-varying state-level shocks. As such, our findings cannot be explained by either differences in industry composition across localities or by variation in state-level economic conditions; nor can our results be explained by differences in firm characteristics or by local economic conditions. Rather, we argue that our findings are best explained by intergenerational mobility influencing human capital formation. Areas with higher mobility do a better job in unlocking their residents? innate talents, which in turn is associated with improved performance by locally headquartered firms. In essence, our results uncover a positive link between greater equality of opportunity and increased corporate profitability.

Keywords: Intergenerational mobility; Corporate profitability; Human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G30 G32 J24 J62 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2019-11-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cfn, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2019081pap.pdf (application/pdf)

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:fip:fedgfe:2019-81

DOI: 10.17016/FEDS.2019.081

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier ().