Intergenerational correlations between parental income and child earnings reflect the extent of intergenerational economic mobility and equality of opportunity. Previous estimates are about 0.2, but these estimates suffer from a number of problems, including the use of but one year of observations and of nonrandom samples. We present new estimates based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. These estimates suggest correlations over 0.5 with longer‐run income and earning measures, as well as some gender and race differences and some impact of liquidity constraints. They also suggest that the intergenerational elasticity is greater as parental income increases, the opposite of the Becker‐Tomes conjecture.
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Behrman et al. (1990) studied this question.