Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01cj82k997s| Title: | Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility |
| Contributors: | Chetty, Raj Hendren, Nathaniel Kline, Patrick Saez, Emmanuel Turner, Nicholas |
| Keywords: | Social mobility--United States Income distribution--United States |
| Issue Date: | 2014 |
| Publisher: | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| Place of Publication: | Cambridge, Mass. |
| Description: | This paper presents new evidence on trends in intergenerational mobility in the U.S. using administrative earnings records. It finds that percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971-1993 birth cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1986, it measures intergenerational mobility based on the correlation between parent and child income percentile ranks. For more recent cohorts, it measures mobility as the correlation between a child’s probability of attending college and her parents’ income rank. It also calculates transition probabilities, such as a child’s chances of reaching the top quintile of the income distribution starting from the bottom quintile. Based on all of these measures, we find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s. However, because inequality has risen, the consequences of the “birth lottery” – the parents to whom a child is born – are larger today than in the past. |
| URI: | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01cj82k997s |
| Related resource: | http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/mobility_trends.pdf |
| Appears in Collections: | Monographic reports and papers (Publicly Accessible) |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| mobility_trends.pdf | 1.27 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Download |
Items in Dataspace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.