The Informational Content of Surnames, the Evolution of Intergenerational Mobility, and Assortative Mating

Abstract

We propose a new methodology for measuring intergenerational mobility in economic wellbeing. Our method is based on the joint distribution of surnames and economic outcomes. It circumvents the need for intergenerational panel data, a long-standing stumbling block for understanding mobility. It does so by using cross-sectional data alongside a calibrated structural model in order to recover the traditional intergenerational elasticity measures. Our main idea is simple. If 'inheritance' is important for economic outcomes, then rare surnames should predict economic outcomes in the cross-section. This is because rare surnames are indicative of familial linkages. If the number of rare surnames is small this approach will not work. However, rare surnames are abundant in the highly-skewed nature of surname distributions from most Western societies. We develop a model that articulates this idea and shows that the more important is inheritance, the more informative will be surnames. This result is robust to a variety of different assumptions about fertility and mating. We apply our method using the 2001 census from Catalonia, a large region of Spain. We use educational attainment as a proxy for overall economic well-being. A calibration exercise results in an estimate of the intergenerational correlation of educational attainment of 0.60. We also find evidence suggesting that mobility has decreased among the different generations of the 20th century. A complementary analysis based on sibling correlations confirms our results and provides a robustness check on our method. Our model and our data allow us to examine one possible explanation for the observed decrease in mobility. We find that the degree of assortative mating has increased over time. Overall, we argue that our method has promise because it can tap the vast mines of census data that are available in a heretofore unexploited manner.

Regulation and rent‐seeking: The role of the distribution of political and economic power

“…There is not much empirical evidence on the distribution of economic and political power in the Spanish regions. However, a recent work by Güell, Rodríguez‐Mora, and Telmer () on social mobility in Catalonia using data on surnames can provide some evidence. From their work, it can be concluded that people with a more Catalonian surname likely have higher human capital and they are relatively more represented in Catalonian parliament and government than people with a less Catalonian surname .…”

“…6 According to the index of control of corruption elaborated by the World Bank, in 2011 Spain was ranked 24th in the list of 34 OECD countries. The average value of this index for OECD countries was 1.26 in 2011, while the value of the Spanish index was 0.81.There is not much empirical evidence on the distribution of economic and political power in the Spanish regions.However, a recent work byGüell, Rodríguez-Mora, and Telmer (2015) on social mobility in Catalonia using data on surnames can provide some evidence. From their work, it can be concluded that people with a more Catalonian surname likely have higher human capital and they are relatively more represented in Catalonian parliament and government than people with a less Catalonian surname.…”

Social closure, surnames and crime

“…A phone book is a lot less expensive than source of information. A notable exception is Güell et al (2015), who study intergenerational mobility, but we differ from them in that, rather than on the informational content of individual surnames, we focus on the diversity of the distribution of surname, which reflects a community's history of male migration and reproduction patterns.…”

Bilingual schooling and earnings: Evidence from a language-in-education reform

“…If workers with non-Catalan origins are discriminated against in the Catalan labour market, the observed earnings effect might reflect a reduction in the 'social distance' between the two groups brought about by the reform, and a consequent reduction in discrimination, rather than a human capital effect as we have argued. Prospective employers cannot always observe parental origins, but in Catalonia there is a close mapping between origins and surnames, the latter being perfectly observable by employers (Güell et al, 2015). According to the discrimination interpretation, we would then expect a positive and significant interaction between compulsory language exposure and the indicator for non-Catalan origins, while the main effect should evaporate.…”