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Title: The Great Escape: Intergenerational Mobility Since 1940

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2015

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Abstract: Tax records indicate that intergenerational mobility (IM) has been stable for cohorts entering the labor market since the 1990s. I show that when using educational attainment as a proxy for adult income, stable IM is a new phenomenon: IM rose significantly for cohorts entering the labor market from 1940 to 1980. I measure IM directly in historical Census data for children still living with their parents at ages 22-25, and indirectly for other children using an imputation procedure that I validate in multiple data sets with parent-child links spanning the full 1940-2000 period. Post-war mobility gains were larger in the South and for blacks, and were driven by gains in high school rather than college enrollment. Controlling for region and year, states with higher IM have had lower income inequality, higher income levels, more educational inputs, higher minimum dropout ages, and lower teen birth rates. IM gains plausibly increased aggregate annual earnings growth by 0.125-0.25 percentage points over the 1940-1980 period.

Url: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21217.pdf

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Authors: Hilger, Nathaniel G.

Series Title: NBER Working Papers

Publication Number: 21217

Institution: National Bureau of Economic Research

Pages: 1-88

Publisher Location: Cambridge, Massachesetts

Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data

Topics: Migration and Immigration, Race and Ethnicity

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