Search Results
Working Paper
Black-white differences in intergenerational economic mobility in the US
Traditional measures of intergenerational mobility such as the intergenerational elasticity are not useful for inferences concerning group differences in mobility with respect to the pooled income distribution. This paper uses transition probabilities and measures of ?directional rank mobility? that can identify interracial differences in intergenerational mobility. The study uses two data sources, including one that contains social security earnings for a large intergenerational sample. I find that recent cohorts of blacks are not only significantly less upwardly mobile but also ...
Working Paper
The Decline in Intergenerational Mobility After 1980
We demonstrate that intergenerational mobility declined sharply for cohorts born between 1957 and 1964 compared to those born between 1942 and 1953. The former entered the labor market largely after the large rise in inequality that occurred around 1980 while the latter entered the labor market before this inflection point. We show that the rank-rank slope rose from 0.27 to 0.4 and the IGE rose from 0.35 to 0.51. The share of children whose income exceeds that of their parents fell by about 3 percentage points. These findings suggest that relative mobility fell by substantially more than ...
Working Paper
The Intergenerational Transmission of Mental and Physical Health in the United Kingdom
We estimate intergenerational health persistence in the United Kingdom using Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY), a broad measure of health derived from the SF-12 Survey. We estimate that both the rank-rank slope and the intergenerational health association (IHA) are 0.21. We use components of the SF-12 to create mental and physical health indices and find that mental health is at least as persistent across generations as physical health. Importantly, parents' mental health is much more strongly associated with children's health than parents' physical health indicating that mental health might ...
Newsletter
How Similar Are Credit Scores Across Generations?
With the rise in economic inequality in the United States in recent decades, there has been growing concern about whether there is a sufficient degree of equality of opportunity in our society. Policymakers and researchers alike often focus on studies of intergenerational mobility as a way of assessing opportunity. These studies typically analyze distinct aspects of socioeconomic status, such as income, education, occupational status, and health, and measure the association in these outcomes between parents and their adult children.1 If the association (level of similarity) is very high, then ...
Working Paper
How did schooling laws improve long-term health and lower mortality?
Although it is well known that there is a strong association between education and health much less is known about how these factors are connected, and whether the relationship is causal. Lleras-Muney (2005) provides perhaps the strongest evidence that education has a causal effect on health. Using state compulsory school laws as instruments, Lleras-Muney finds large effects of education on mortality. We revisit these results, noting they are not robust to state time trends, even when the sample is vastly expanded and a coding error rectified. We employ a dataset containing a broad array of ...
Newsletter
Is intergenerational economic mobility lower now than in the past?
This article presents evidence on long-term trends in intergenerational economic mobility in the United States and considers the prospects for intergenerational mobility going forward.
Journal Article
Family resources and college enrollment
This article reviews the literature on the effects of family income and tuition costs on college and enrollment and finds mixed evidence in support of tuition subsidies. The author also presents new evidence showing that college enrollment is especially sensitive to income for families with modest amounts of wealth, suggesting that borrowing constraints may be a factor in limiting access to higher education.
Newsletter
How did unemployment insurance extensions affect the unemployment rate in 2008–10?
During recessions, it is common for the federal government to extend the standard unemployment insurance (UI) program. Many economic studies have shown that workers who receive UI extensions tend to take longer to find new employment, leading to a somewhat longer average duration of unemployment among all workers.
Journal Article
New evidence on labor market dynamics over the business cycle
Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau?s Survey of Income and Program Participation, the author investigates how much of the cyclicality in unemployment is due to variation in the job finding rate versus the job separation rate. In addition, the article explores how employment dynamics have differed by demographic subgroups.
Journal Article
What is behind the rise in long-term unemployment?
This article analyzes what is behind the recent unprecedented rise in long-term unemployment and explains what this rise might imply for the economy going forward. In particular, the authors attribute the sharp increase in unemployment duration in 2009 to especially weak labor demand and, to a lesser degree, extensions in unemployment insurance benefits.