Intergenerational Earnings Mobility Revisited: Estimates Based on Lifetime Earnings
23 Pages Posted: 28 Feb 2012
Date Written: March 2012
Abstract
Using Norwegian intergenerational data, which include a substantial part of the life‐cycle earnings for children and almost the entire life‐cycle earnings for their fathers, we present new estimates of intergenerational mobility. Extending the length of fathers’ earnings window from 5 to 25 years increases estimated elasticities. Increasing the age at which fathers’ earnings are observed has the opposite effect. Biases in the estimated elasticities are related to both transitory earnings variation and life‐cycle measurement error; the former appear to be more important than the latter. Estimation bias stemming from persistence in transitory innovations plays only a minor role. Our findings indicate that intergenerational earnings mobility in Norway might have been strongly overstated in many earlier studies with shorter earnings histories. Some of our new estimates are twice as large as earlier estimates.
Keywords: Intergenerational mobility, measurement error
JEL Classification: J62, C23
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Trends in Intergenerational Income Mobility
By Chul-in Lee and Gary Solon
-
Life-Cycle Variation in the Association between Current and Lifetime Earnings
By Steven J. Haider and Gary Solon
-
By David Card, John E. Dinardo, ...
Intergenerational Earnings Mobility Revisited: Estimates Based on Lifetime Earnings
This is a Wiley-Blackwell Publishing paper. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing charges $42.00 .
File name: j-9442.pdf
Size: 664K
If you wish to purchase the right to make copies of this paper for distribution to others, please select the quantity.
