The paper investigates the effects of intra-family talent transmission when human capital exhibits indivisibilities and parental financing of education involves borrowing constraints. Positive talent correlation reduces social mobility but steady state inequality and macroeconomic...

Using data from the German Socio Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1984 to 2007, this paper analyses the amount, the development and the explanations of wage mobility, as well as volatility in West Germany, measured by ranks in the wage distribution. Individual wage mobility decreased between...

Mit der Studie "Kaum Bewegung, viel Ungleichheit" legt die Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung eine Untersuchung zur Entwicklung sozialer Mobilität in Deutschland vor. Der Autor der Studie, Dr. Reinhard Pollak vom Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, kommt darin zu einem ernüchternden...

This paper studies how heterogeneity in income dynamics affects the POUM hypothesis (the idea that poor people do not support high level of redistribution because they hope to be rich in the future). We consider a setting where individuals evaluate their expected future income using both their...

Using harmonized household survey data, we analyse long run social mobility in the US, the UK, and Germany and test recent theories of multigenerational persistence of socio-economic status. In this country comparison setting we find evidence against Gregory Clark's "universal law of social...

This paper investigates social mobility in Bolivia and discusses its implications for poverty reduction and long-run growth. Regressions based on household survey data show that social mobility is very low in Bolivia, even by Latin American standards. This is mainly caused by an inadequate...