In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850 –1940

Abstract

This paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the United States using a novel empirical strategy. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo-links across generations. We find that both father-son and father-daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century, increased sharply between 1900 and 1920, and declined slightly thereafter. We discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development, trends in inequality and returns to human capital, and the marriage market in explaining these patterns. (JEL D63, J12, J16, J24, J62, N31, N32)

Intergenerational Mobility in the 19th Century: Micro-Level Evidence from the City of Zurich

“…These studies show a very high persistence in social status over time. Olivetti and Paserman (2015) analyze fatherdaughter mobility in the 19th century US employing a novel strategy related to first names. Dribe and Svensson (2008), Dribe et al (2015), Helgertz (2016), andLindahl et al (2015) describe mobilty in 19th century Sweden.…”

A Reconsideration of the Sugar Sweetened Beverage Tax in a Household Production Model

“…The major concern of applying TS2SLS is how to obtain the asymptotic covariance matrix of the second stage estimator to estimate standard errors. There are two commonly used methods to address this issue -Inoue and Solon(2010)'s method which originates from Murphy and Topel's (1986) two step estimator(e.g., Currie and Yelowitz, 2001;Berg,Pinger, and Schoch, 2016), and a bootstrap method (e.g., Bjorklund&Jantti, 1997;Anderson, 2011;Olivetti and Paserman, 2015). In this paper, we follow Inoue and Solon (2010)'s approach, a simple version of the method is expressed as follows:…”

Intergenerational Wealth Mobility in France, 19th and 20th Century

“…Wealth is observed for both generations and we have reconstructed family linkages based on marriage and bequest records. Thus we do not have to rely on pseudo‐panel estimation in order to reconstruct parental outcomes based on names (Olivetti and Paserman, ) or locations (Aaronson and Mazumder, )…”

“…A few papers go back to the 19th century (Long and Ferrie, 2013 on occupational mobility in Britain and in the U.S.; Modalsli, 2015 on Norway) and find that mobility is not constant over time, its evolution being related to structural change in the pattern of jobs (out of farming), the spread of public education and migration. Olivetti and Paserman (2015) also relate the evolution of earnings mobility in the U.S. between 1850 and 1940 to fertility transition, migration, and industrialization.…”

“…Wealth is observed for both generations and we have reconstructed family linkages based on marriage and bequest records. Thus we do not have to rely on pseudo-panel estimation in order to reconstruct parental outcomes based on names (Olivetti and Paserman, 2015) or locations (Aaronson and Mazumder, 2008) Our main contribution comes from the length of our timeframe. For over more than a century, society has evolved: social groups have gained or lost importance, new opportunities have emerged and activities have shifted from one place to another.…”