Explore the vast range of titles available.

We examine intergenerational mobility differences between Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the US. Using ranks, we find that the US is substantially less intergenerationally mobile than the three European countries and that the most mobile region of the US is less mobile than the least mobile regions of Norway and Sweden. Using a linear estimator of income share mobility, we find that the four countries have very similar rates of intergenerational mobility. However, when we use non-parametric versions of rank and income share mobility, we find that the US tends to experience lower upward mobility at the bottom of the income distribution than Norway and Sweden.

New evidence shows that intergenerational social mobility—the rate at which children born into poverty climb the income ladder—varies considerably across the United States. Is this current geography of opportunity something new or does it reflect a continuation of long-term trends? We answer this question by constructing data on the levels and determinants of social mobility across American regions over the 20th century. We find that the changing geography of opportunity-generating economic activity restructures the landscape of intergenerational mobility, but factors associated with specific regional structures of interpersonal and racial inequality that have “deep roots” generate persistence. This is evident in the sharp decline in social mobility in the Midwest as economic activity has shifted away from it and the consistently low levels of opportunity in the South even as economic activity has shifted toward it. We conclude that the long-term geography of social mobility can be understood through the deep roots and changing economic fortunes of places.

We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average, a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 percentile increase in a child’s income. Second, intergenerational mobility varies substantially across areas within the United States. For example, the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte but 12.9% in San Jose. Third, we explore the factors correlated with upward mobility. High mobility areas have (i) less residential segregation, (ii) less income inequality, (iii) better primary schools, (iv) greater social capital, and (v) greater family stability. Although our descriptive analysis does not identify the causal mechanisms that determine upward mobility, the publicly available statistics on intergenerational mobility developed here can facilitate research on such mechanisms.

This article reviews the sociological and economic literature on intergenerational mobility. Findings on social class, occupational status, earnings, and income mobility are discussed and discrepancies among them are evaluated. The review also examines nonlinearities in the intergenerational association, variation in mobility across advanced industrial countries, and recent mobility trends in the United States. The literature suggests an association between inequality and economic mobility at the country level, with the United States featuring higher inequality and lower mobility than other advanced industrial countries. However, mobility has not declined in the United States over the recent decades in which inequality has expanded. The inequality-mobility relationship fails to emerge when occupational measures of mobility are used, likely because these measures do not fully capture some mechanisms of economic reproduction.

My focus is on the degree to which increasing inequality in the high-income countries, particularly in the United States, is likely to limit economic mobility for the next generation of young adults. I discuss the underlying drivers of opportunity that generate the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. The goal is to explain why America differs from other countries, how intergenerational mobility will change in an era of higher inequality, and how the process is different for the top 1 percent. I begin by presenting evidence that countries with more inequality at one point in time also experience less earnings mobility across the generations, a relationship that has been called “The Great Gatsby Curve.” The interaction between 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—but they do so in different ways across national contexts. Both cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers are all configured most likely to lower, or at least not raise, the degree of intergenerational earnings mobility for the next generation of Americans coming of age in a more polarized labor market. This trend will likely continue unless there are changes in public policy that promote the human capital of children in a way that offers relatively greater benefits to the relatively disadvantaged.

This study estimates intergenerational wealth correlations across up to four generations and examines the degree to which the wealth association between parents and children can be explained by inheritances. Using a Swedish data set with newly hand-collected data on wealth and bequests, we find parent-child rank correlations of 0.3-0.4 and grandparent-grandchild rank correlations of 0.1-0.2. Bequests and gifts appear to be central in this process, accounting for at least half of the parent-child wealth correlation while earnings and education can account for only a quarter.

We present new evidence on trends in intergenerational mobility in the United States using administrative earnings records. We find 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, we measure intergenerational mobility based on the correlation between parent and child income percentile ranks. For more recent cohorts, we measure mobility as the correlation between a child's probability of attending college and her parents' income rank. We also calculate 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.

We make use of newly available data that include roughly 5 million linked household and population records from 1850 to 2015 to document long-term trends in intergenerational social mobility in the United States. Intergenerational mobility declined substantially over the past 150 y, but more slowly than previously thought. Intergenerational occupational rank–rank correlations increased from less than 0.17 to as high as 0.32, but most of this change occurred to Americans born before 1900. After controlling for the relatively high mobility of persons from farm origins, we find that intergenerational social mobility has been remarkably stable. In contrast with relative stability in rank-based measures of mobility, absolute mobility for the nonfarm population—the fraction of offspring whose occupational ranks are higher than those of their parents—increased for birth cohorts born prior to 1900 and has fallen for those born after 1940.

This article draws on the extensive literature on economic and social mobility in America to examine intergenerational contextual mobility, defined as the degree to which inequalities in neighborhood environments persist across generations. PSID data are analyzed to reveal remarkable continuity in neighborhood economic status from one generation to the next. The primary consequence of persistent neighborhood stratification is that the racial inequality in America's neighborhoods that existed a generation ago has been transmitted, for the most part unchanged, to the current generation. More than 70% of black children who grow up in the poorest quarter of American neighborhoods remain in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods as adults, compared to 40% of whites. The results suggest that racial inequality in neighborhood economic status is substantially underestimated with short-term measures of neighborhood income or poverty and, second, that the steps taken to end racial discrimination in the housing and lending markets have not enabled black Americans to advance out of America's poorest neighborhoods. Adapted from the source document.

We construct comparable measures of intergenerational mobility (IM) for 103 Italian provinces using the methodology of Güell et al. (2007, 2015a) and explore their correlation with a variety of social and economic outcomes. We find that higher IM is positively associated with economic activity, education and social capital and negatively correlated with inequality. Moreover, there is no clear pattern of correlation with other socio-political variables. These results are qualitatively similar to Chetty et al (2014), with the important difference that Italy is a highly centralised state where institutions and policies are 'de jure' the same in all provinces. This suggests that something beyond institutional and policy differences also shapes intergenerational mobility.