Full Citation
Title: Spurious Mobility in Imperfectly Linked Historical Data
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2006
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: When was the United States a land of opportunity? This paper revisits the history of intergenerational mobility in the US, accounting for the impact of imperfectly linked census data. Incorrectly linked observations typically attenuate ordinary least squares (OLS) esti- mates, such as the association of income ranks among fathers and sons. This attenuation exaggerates levels of mobility, as mobility is inversely related to the strength of the relation- ship between parents’ and children’s outcomes. I address bias due to imperfectly linked data from the perspective of nonclassical measurement error and propose a class of models for misclassification—error in discrete data—that rely on a repeated, conditionally independent measure of the misclassified variable. A natural source for such a repeated measure can be found by linking observations into an additional sample. In a validation exercise, the proposed estimator reduces bias by 50-90% relative to OLS, with a larger reduction in bias on more severely misclassified samples. After correcting for misclassification error, estimates of the rank-rank slope of occupation status for White men born between 1832 and 1910 are 50-100% higher than OLS estimates, depending on the cohort. Revised estimates suggest a U-shape pattern for intergenerational mobility in US history. Individuals born before the Civil War experienced levels of mobility comparable to the present, while those born between the Civil War and WWI—who entered the workforce during the highest levels of inequality in the US before the present—experienced lower levels of mobility than in any region in the US today.
Url: https://ramattheis.github.io/files/jmp_mattheis.pdf
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Mattheis, Ross
Publisher:
Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data
Topics: Family and Marriage, Poverty and Welfare
Countries: