We show that the patterns of intergenerational earnings mobility in Denmark, Finland and Norway, unlike those for the US and the UK, are highly nonlinear. The Nordic relationship between log earnings of sons and fathers is flat in the lower segments of the fathersÕ earnings distribution -sons growing up in the poorest households have the same adult earnings prospects as sons in moderately poor households -and is increasingly positive in middle and upper segments. This convex pattern contrasts sharply with our findings for the US and the UK, where the relationship is much closer to being linear. As a result, cross-country comparisons of intergenerational earnings elasticities may be misleading with respect to transmission mechanisms in the central parts of the earnings distribution and uninformative in the tails of the distribution.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent, nonprofit limited liability company (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung) supported by the Deutsche Post AG. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its research networks, research support, and visitors and doctoral programs. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. The current research program deals with (1) mobility and flexibility of labor markets, (2) internationalization of labor markets and European integration, (3) the welfare state and labor markets, (4) labor markets in transition, (5) the future of work, (6) project evaluation and (7) general labor economics. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. Even though these results turn out to be somewhat sensitive to some assumptions that have to be made, we conclude that the family and community factors are more important determinants of long-run earnings in the United States than in the Nordic countries.JEL Classification: D1, D3, J62

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte.

Labor market conditions at the time and place of potential entry into the labor market are shown to have a substantial and persistent effect on adult employment prospects. Individuals who face particularly depressed local labor markets when they graduate from secondary education, are-other things equal-subject to relatively high rates of nonemployment during their whole prime-age work career. Building on a unique combination of micro and macro data from Norway, we show that these effects are robust with respect to model specification and conditioning variables, and that they are not limited to individuals with a particularly disadvantaged background. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Using longitudinal data from the date of arrival, we study long‐term labour market and social insurance outcomes for all major immigrant cohorts to Norway since 1970. Immigrants from high‐income countries performed as natives, while labour migrants from low‐income source countries had declining employment rates and increasing disability programme participation over the lifecycle. Refugees and family migrants assimilated during the initial period upon arrival but labour market convergence halted after a decade and was accompanied by rising social insurance rates. For the children of labour migrants of the 1970s, we uncover evidence of intergenerational assimilation in education, earnings and fertility.