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Title: Gender and Intergenerational Mobility: Using Health Outcomes to Compare Intergenerational Mobility Across Gender and Over Time

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2016

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Abstract: Changes in intergenerational mobility over time have been the focus of extensive research. However, existing studies have been limited to studying males and intergenerational correlations in outcome variables that often lack clear welfare implications. This paper introduces a new approach to estimating intergenerational mobility that relies on health measures rather than occupational measures to assess the strength of the relationship between the outcomes of parents and their children. Health measures provide a metric for intergenerational mobility that can be consistently interpreted over time and across genders. Using a new intergenerational dataset constructed by linking individuals' death certificates to those of their parents, I find that a son's life span is strongly correlated with his father's and that this correlation has strengthened over time. Daughter's life span shows a similarly strong relationship with mother's life span that has remained relatively stable over the past century. Differences in life span are shown to correlate with occupational status and occupational transitions from one generation to the next.

Url: https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/parman_march_9.pdf

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Authors: Parman, John

Publisher: College of William & Mary and NBER

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Gender, Other

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