Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the 20th Century

Elisa Jácome, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu

No 29289, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We estimate long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for representative samples of the U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that include father's occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show that mobility increases between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts and that the decline of Black-white income gaps explains about half of this rise. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly women, considerably overstates the level of mobility for twentieth-century birth cohorts while simultaneously understating its increase between the 1910s and 1940s.

JEL-codes: H0 J15 J16 N3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-his and nep-lab
Note: CH DAE LS PE
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