We study the role of marriage for women's intergenerational mobility during the Ming-Qing (1368-1911) period. Using status information based on the timing of marriage from family histories in Central China, already in the early 1500s it is the case that daughters from rich families attain higher...

This paper develops an approach to intergenerational mobility in which the trajectories of parental incomes during childhood and adolescence are the conditioning objects for characterizing dependence across generations. We use functional regression methods to produce an intergenerational...

We estimate the causal effect of each county in the U.S. on children's incomes in adulthood. We first estimate a fixed effects model that is identified by analyzing families who move across counties with children of different ages. We then use these fixed effect estimates to (a) quantify how...

We show that the neighborhoods in which children grow up shape their earnings, college attendance rates, and fertility and marriage patterns by studying more than seven million families who move across commuting zones and counties in the U.S. Exploiting variation in the age of children when...

This paper presents a new approach to measuring the intergenerational transmission of well-being and a novel perspective on which measures and what age ranges to use to estimate intergenerational social mobility. We select the measures and the age ranges that best predict important human capital...

This essay reviews the theory and empirics of intergenerational mobility. Our review draws on models and empirical analyses of classic and more recent work from both economics and sociology. We summarize models and the surrounding empirical evidence of two key sets of mechanisms: family factors...

We present the first estimates of long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for samples that are representative of the full U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that ask about father's occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the...

We examine intergenerational mobility (IM) in educational attainment in Africa since independence, using census data from 26 countries. First, we map and characterize the geography of IM. There is substantial variation both across and within countries with differences in literacy of the old...

We link tax returns across two generations to provide the first estimate of intergenerational mobility in Italy based on administrative income data. Italy emerges as less immobile than previously depicted by studies using proxies for economic status or survey data with imputation procedures....

Using county-level analysis, this study demonstrates that there exists at most a minor relationship between the large, contemporary geographical variation in U.S. intergenerational income mobility and state-level policies. In addition to investigating the effects of specific policies, we...