A state school system should be expected to reduce income inequality and to make intergenerational mobility easier. It is therefore somewhat surprising to observe that Italy, in comparison to the United States, displays less inequality between occupational incomes, but lower intergenerational...

We use a general equilibrium OLG model to analyse the relation between intergenerational social mobility and wage inequality. We show that the correlation between mobility and inequality depends on which factor caused the change in inequality. The model can thus help discriminate between...

We use Swedish adoption data combined with police register data to study parent-son associations in crime. For adopted sons born in Sweden, we have access to the criminal records of both the adopting and biological parents. This allows us to assess the relative importance of pre-birth factors...

This paper provides a new perspective on intergenerational mobility in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We devise an empirical strategy that allows to calculate intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes. The key insight of our approach...

The intergenerational elasticity of income is considered one of the best measures of the degree to which a society gives equal opportunity to its members. While much research has been devoted to measuring this reduced-form parameter, less is known about its underlying structural determinants....

This paper studies the role of internal migration in income convergence across regions in Japan. Neoclassical theory predicts that migration should have been an important source of convergence, but regression results suggest otherwise. The paper investigates the possibility that this discrepancy...

This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labor markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of non-overlapping administrative units, thus avoiding problems of mismeasurement of local labor markets...

We study how political boundaries and fiscal competition interact with the labor and land markets to determine the economic structure and performance of metropolitan areas. Contrary to general belief, institutional fragmentation need not be welfare-decreasing, and commuting from the suburbs to...

This paper uses variation created by parental deaths in the amount of time children spend with each parent to examine whether the parent-child correlation in schooling outcomes stems from a causal relationship. Using a large sample of Israeli children who lost one parent during childhood, we...

We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioural problems, grade repetition and obesity. We address endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting with variation in schooling costs when the mother grew up. Using matched data from...