Abstract
Rosemary Hyson (2003) "Differences
in Intergenerational Mobility across the Earnings Distribution."
There is a broad range of work which looks at the transmission of various outcomes-earnings,
education, and poverty-between parents and children. If a society is
concerned with ensuring equal opportunity for all its members, then it is
important to understand the extent to which such outcomes are transmitted
from one generation to the next. The degree to which outcomes are
transmitted, however, is likely to be related to socioeconomic
circumstances and may result in different degrees of intergenerational
mobility across groups. In this paper, I examine whether or not the
transmission of earnings from parents to children differs across the
distribution of parent earnings. I examine non-linearities in the
intergenerational earnings mobility using semi-parametric estimates of the
relationship between father and children's earnings. When I allow for a
flexible, non-linear relationship between father's and children's
earnings, it appears that parental earnings have the greatest effect in
the middle of the distribution. Hypothesis tests indicate that the effect
of father's earnings is significantly greater for daughters and sons in
the middle and upper portions of the distribution than for those at the
bottom.
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