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...

A strong association between incomes across generations - with children from poor families likely to be poor as adults - is frequently considered an indicator of insufficient equality of opportunity. Studies of such "intergenerational persistence," or lack of intergenerational mobility, are...

This paper studies intergenerational mobility in Latin America and shows that, in addition to the well-documented fact that the Latin American income distribution is highly unequal, profound differences in opportunities persist from one generation to the next. Comparing final educational...

This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more...

This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more...

This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to illustrate how better access to higher education can lead to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century...

We present the first estimates of intergenerational wealth correlation for Australia, using HILDA. The rank correlation varies greatly by child age when wealth is observed, from 0.1 before age 30, to 0.5 after age 40. Most children in our estimation sample are young. For these children overall,...

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...

We estimate the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) of income for the Netherlands using complete population data for around 177,000 28-year olds. We find that IGEs are much lower when actual individual income data are used rather than proxies or aggregates for income. Though low, daughters' IGEs...

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...