Several recent papers have cited non-linearities in the relationship between incomes of parents and their children as evidence of important intergenerational credit constraints. This paper argues that any pattern in the conditional expectation function can be justified by a properly constructed...

The estimation of intergenerational earnings mobility is rife with measurement problems since the research does not observe permanent, lifetime earnings. Nearly all studies make corrections for mean variation in earnings because of the age differences among respondents. Recent works employ...