Intergenerational Mobility, Gender Differences and the Role of Out-Migration : New Evidence from Spain

This paper provides the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility in Spain based on rich administrative data linking millions of parents and children through tax returns. Four main results arise. First, Spain is located somewhere in the middle between high-mobility countries such as Scandinavian countries and low-mobility ones such as the United States or Italy. Second, geographical variation in mobility rates is high in Spain but smaller than in other compared countries. Third, daughters have systematically worse outcomes in both relative and absolute mobility measures than sons, with a gender gap that amounts for almost 13% of per capita national income at the median of the distribution. Fourth, exploiting the high comparability degree of siblings that have the exact same values of observable characteristics, I document a positive effect of out-migration on various upward mobility outcomes