AME Labour Economics Seminar, at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI):

Elisa Jácome from Northwestern University presents Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the 20th Century (joint work with Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu)

This is an in-person only event.

Read more about our seminars series, workshops and conferences here:

Conferences and seminars

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.