This paper studies the association between the unemployment experience of fathers and their sons. Based on German survey data that cover the last decades we find significant positive correlations. Using instrumental variables estimation and the Gottschalk (1996) method we investigate to what...

We study the importance of the extended family - the dynasty - for the persistence in inequality across generations. We use data including the entire Swedish population, linking four generations. This data structure enables us to identify parents' siblings and cousins, their spouses, and the...

Empirical findings suggest a positive correlation between inequality and social immobility, a phenomenon coined the Gatsby curve. However, complete explanations of the phenomenon have not yet been proposed. This paper answers two questions: What are Gatsby curves? When do they exist? We build a...

We provide the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility for a developing country, namely Brazil. We measure formal income from tax and employment registries, and we train machine learning models on census and survey data to predict informal income. The data reveal a much higher...

This article presents a novel explanation why demand for redistribution on average does not respond to information on low intergenerational mobility. Building on insights from behavioral economics, we expect that incentives to update perceptions of intergenerational mobility change along the...

We investigate the role of firms in intergenerational mobility by decomposing the intergenerational elasticity of earnings (IGE) into firm-IGE and individual-IGE using a two-way fixed effects framework. Using data from Israel, we find that the firm component is responsible for 22% of the overall...

We study the intergenerational transmission of welfare benefit receipt in Germany. We first describe the correlation between welfare receipt experienced in the parental household and subsequent own welfare receipt of young adults. In a second step, we investigate whether the observed...

We apply a partial identification analysis using comprehensive Norwegian register data to investigate the causal effect of father’s income on child income. We find a strong association between the incomes of fathers and children. The causal effect, however, equals at least 1% and at most 51%...

Are the United States still a land of opportunity? We provide new insights on this question by invoking a novel measurement approach that allows us to target the joint distribution of income and wealth. We show that inequality of opportunity has increased by 77% over the time period 1983-2016....