Intergenerational Persistence in Latent Socioeconomic Status: Evidence from Sweden and the United States

111

This article shows that across multiple generations, the persistence of occupational and educational attainment in Germany is larger than estimates from two generations suggest. We consider two recent interpretations. First, we assess Gregory Clark's hypotheses that the true rate of intergenerational persistence is higher than the observed rate, as high as 0.75, and time‐invariant. Our evidence supports the first but not the other two hypotheses. Second, we test for independent effects of grandparents. We show that the coefficient on grandparent status is positive in a wide class of Markovian models and present evidence against its causal interpretation.

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Transmission of Inequality Across Multiple Generations: Testing Recent Theories With Evidence From Germany

Braun

Stuhler

2017

111

“…The upper bounds on the confidence intervals are, respectively, 0.585, 0.585, 0.622 and 0.629, still falling short of the hypothesised persistence rate. The precision of these estimates is hampered by the PSID sample size, but Vosters and Nybom () find strikingly similar – and more precise – results for Sweden, with similarly small increases in persistence estimates, even after using more detailed measures and incorporating analogous measures for mothers.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Is the Simple Law of Mobility Really a Law? Testing Clark's Hypothesis

Vosters

2018

Self Cite

Recent work by Gregory Clark and co-authors uses a new surnames approach to examine intergenerational mobility, finding much higher persistence rates than traditionally estimated. Clark proposes a model of social mobility to explain the diverging estimates, including the crucial but untested hypothesis that traditional estimates of intergenerational persistence are biased downward because they use only one measure (e.g. earnings) of underlying status. I test for evidence of this using an approach from Lubotsky and Wittenberg (2006), incorporating information from multiple measures into an estimate of intergenerational persistence with the least attenuation bias. Contrary to Clark's prediction, I do not find evidence of substantial bias in prior estimates. . et al. (2007) is an oft cited recent example providing intergenerational correlation and regression coefficients in educational attainment for 42 countries; Bj€ orklund and Salvanes (2011) also provide a succinct review of related literature. Additionally, another subset of the literature is concerned with intergenerational persistence in occupation or occupational prestige. Hodge (1966) is an early example studying intergenerational occupational mobility in the US, while Ferrie (2007, 2013) are more recent examples; see also Black and Devereux (2011) for a brief discussion of related studies.3 See Clark (2014) for a comprehensive list of these studies, as well as the more recent papers and . 4 For the data sources containing explicit socio-economic measures, such as probated wealth at death, (1) is estimated using the group averages of wealth for rare surnames. For data without such measures, the approach instead looks at persistence in the representation of the rare surname in an 'elite' group relative to representation in the population as a whole. 5 G€ uell et al. (2015) show that rare surnames do contain such information, and propose a method using the joint distribution of surnames and economic status to explore intergenerational transmission of status in Spain.

“…The resulting estimate was not ‘much closer’ to the 0.7–0.8 range. When Vosters and Nybom (forthcoming) subsequently carried out a similar exercise with Swedish data, the intergenerational elasticity estimate rose from 0.23 to less than 0.30, even further below Clark's 0.7–0.8 range.…”

Section: Clark's Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 95%

What Do We Know So Far about Multigenerational Mobility?

Solon

2018

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