The economic mobility of individuals and households is of fundamental interest. While many measures of economic mobility exist, reliance on transition matrices remains pervasive due to simplicity and ease of interpretation. However, estimation of transition matrices is complicated by the...

In this paper, we analyze the extent to which market forces create an incentive for cloning human beings. We show that a market for cloning arises if a large enough fraction of the clone?s income can be appropriated by its model. Only people with the highest ability are cloned, while people at...

We evaluate a temporary public sector employment program targeted at individuals with weak labor market attachment, applying dynamic inverse probability weighting to account for dynamic selection. We show that the program is successful in increasing employment and reducing social assistance....

A large literature shows that the children of immigrants have high upward mobility. However, immigrants vary vastly in how they are selected: while economic immigrants are chosen based on skill and education, refugees migrate at times of conflict and war. In this paper, we study the mobility of...

There is a clear consensus that childhood experiences shape adult success, yet there is limited understanding of their impact on future generations. We proxy parental investments during childhood with birth order and study whether disadvantages due to lower investments are transmitted to future...

The community in which a child is raised has a substantial effect on their income in adulthood. To help understand what is different about communities which produce higher incomes, we document how time use differs between communities which increase vs. decrease incomes. The main differences are...

Families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child's opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background. Cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers will most likely lower the degree of...

We examine how intergenerational income mobility responds to structural changes in a simple theoretical model of intergenerational transmission, deviating from the existing literature by explicitly analyzing the transition path between steady states. We find that mobility depends not only on...

This paper is prepared as a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution, Volume 2 (edited by A. B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Elsevier-North Holland, forthcoming). Like the other chapters in the volume (and its predecessor), the aim is to provide comprehensive review of a particular area...

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...