Intergenerational Mobility
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)
- Chair: Bhashkar Mazumder, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Family Trees and Falling Apples: Intergenerational Mobility Estimates from U.S. Genealogy Data
Abstract
Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the United States have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets that include information on both parents and their adult children. This problem has been especially acute for women, who are more difficult to link because their surnames often change between childhood and adulthood. In this paper, we use a new dataset, the Census Tree, that overcomes these issues by building on information from an online genealogy platform. Users of the platform have private information that allows them to create links among the 1850 to 1940 decennial censuses; the Census Tree combines these links with others obtained using traditional linking methods to produce a dataset with hundreds of millions of census-to-census links, nearly half of which are for women. With these data, we produce estimates of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status from fathers to their sons and daughters. We find that for married men and women, the patterns of mobility over this period are similar, though marriage emerges as an engine of mobility for women in later cohorts as assortative mating declines. Single women, however, are less mobile than their male counterparts.Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the 20th Century
Abstract
We estimate long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for representative samples of the U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that include father’s occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show that mobility increases between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts and that the decline of Black-white income gaps explains about half of this rise. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly women, considerably overstates the level of mobility for twentieth-century birth cohorts while simultaneously understating its increase between the 1910s and 1940s.U.S. Educational Mobility in the Twentieth Century
Abstract
This paper describes the geography of intergenerational educational mobility for both men and women born in the 20th century and its local correlates. We use supervised machine-learning to link 1.7 million men and women in the Social Security Application Records to the full-count 1940 Census, while keeping Type I linking error rates very low, and reweight the linked sample to resemble the national population. We find that the geography of educational mobility was broadly similar to the geography of income mobility, with the highest rates of mobility in the Northeast and the West of the country and the lowest rates of mobility in the South. Counties with high rates of mobility had (i) lower income inequality, (ii) higher community-level literacy rates, (iii) higher levels of economic development, and (iv) greater public good provision. The geography and the correlates of educational mobility were similar for men and women.Discussant(s)
Jonathan Rothbaum
,
U.S. Census Bureau
Peter Z. Lin
,
University of California-Los Angeles
Maggie R. Jones
,
U.S. Census Bureau
Matthew Staiger
,
Opportunity Insights
JEL Classifications
- J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers
- J1 - Demographic Economics