Essays on the economics of intergenerational mobility and more

Essays on the economics of intergenerational mobility and more PDF Author:
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ISBN: 9788772094939
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Three Essays in Economic Mobility and Inequality

Three Essays in Economic Mobility and Inequality PDF Author: Seunghee Lee (Economist)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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As the interest in Economics on inequality has exploded, intergenerational mobility is one of the fundamental areas concerning inequality since it is related to many normative questions such as equal opportunity and fairness. Despite its importance, research on measuring intergenerational mobility has received relatively little attention. The dominant approach is still the scalar-based regression approach, which employs a regression of some statistics of offspring on some statistics of parents. In connection with this issue, this dissertation introduces a novel measure for intergenerational mobility based on modern economic theory and empirically analyzes intergenerational mobility in the U.S. and Korea.The first chapter analyzes the empirical aspect of the relationship between parental income trajectory and a child's success in the U.S. using a novel approach, functional approach.In particular, we find that parental income when their children are in their late teens is more correlated with children's income in their early 30s. In addition, children whose parental income tends to increase in their late teens are more likely to have a higher economic position than their parents. This implies that upward income mobility is positively associated with the steadily increasing economic status of the family over the first 20 years of children's life. Investigated further are the effects on explaining a child's success of the role of other trajectories, such as the family structure of unemployment and job type of household head, and the impact of parental education level. We also investigate the association between parental income profile and their children's college attendance and derive a similar finding that late teens are crucial periods when parents' income has a more significant impact on children's educational success.While the first chapter addresses issues in intergenerational mobility in the U.S., the second chapter focuses on intergenerational mobility in Korea. In the second chapter, using a similar approach to Chapter 1, we analyze the intergenerational mobility in all three dimensions - income, education, and occupation. In addition, reflecting Korea's unique historical and social characteristics, we study the association between investment in private tutoring and a child's economic and educational success. Our findings highlight the importance of parental intervention in teens on a child's educational success. The pattern of parental income profile of the upward mobility group shows a stronger upward trend than that of the downward mobility group, similar to what we observe in the U.S. data in Chapter 1. In Korea, both upward and downward mobility groups show steadily increasing parental income trajectories, reflecting the rapid economic growth Korea has experienced over the last six decades. This interesting and unique finding of mobility patterns in Korea reveals various social and economic structural changes Korea has gone through.The third chapter studies the various methodological issues. In this chapter, we consider how our functional estimate can be varied by the fluctuation of measurement error in parental income. Using Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, we decompose parental income into permanent and transitory components and consider the transitory component as a measurement error. We also compare our estimation method with the methods based on the fixed basis approach. Using too many bases in this approach yields nonsensical estimates, while the estimates using too few bases strongly depend on the shape of the basis. We also find that the fixed basis approach is not robust to measurement error. A possible endogeneity issue is also studied in this chapter. Parental income can affect their children's success through two channels, transmission of human capital and providing financial resources. To focus on the effect of financial resources, we measure intergenerational income mobility using instrumental variables to control the effect of human capital.

Essays on the Economics of Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility

Essays on the Economics of Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility PDF Author: Tung Xuan Dang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Despite a substantial amount of research carried out over the past few decades to understand the economic impact of immigration and the determinants of intergenerational mobility, many important questions remain unanswered. Taking advantage of recently available large-scale administrative, household, and firm data, as well as latest developments in causal inference techniques, this dissertation makes forays into three relatively uncharted research areas on these topics. On the economic impact of immigration, the first chapter examines demand-side effects on local labor markets and firms-effects that arise not from an increase in immigration-induced local labor supply, which has hitherto been a focal point in the immigration literature, but from an increase in consumption-induced demand for local goods and services. To isolate these effects, the empirical analysis focuses on the growing presence of international students in the United States, most of whom are not able to undertake paid employment throughout their courses of study but have been generating a substantial amount of spending in local economies surrounding universities and colleges. Using a shift-share instrumental variable estimation approach and, in particular, quasi-experimental variation drawn from fluctuations in the outflows of students across countries of origin to other English-speaking destinations, I show that international students lead to substantial increases in local jobs and earnings: one additional student per thousand residents increases the employment-to-population ratio by 0.31 percentage points and average wages by 0.69 percent. These effects are concentrated in non-tradable industries, particularly in construction, retail, and services. Furthermore, local demand shocks induced by an increase in international student enrollment result in significant within-industry labor reallocations as more efficient firms are created and expand while the least efficient ones contract and exit. These results are consistent with general equilibrium models with heterogeneous firms and highlight important economic benefits from international students in the form of increases in local income and aggregate productivity. On intergenerational mobility, the second chapter studies the importance of intra-household bargaining in mediating how family resources determine children's participation in higher education. Using labor force and household survey data from Indonesia, this chapter shows evidence consistent with Nash-bargaining models of household decision making, whereby changes in women's outside options relative to men's result in more decisions made within the household by women, especially those related to expenditures on children. Accordingly, relative improvements in women's bargaining power when children graduate from high school significantly increase their likelihood of university enrollment, holding household resources and children's ability indicators constant. This effect is quantitatively similar for both boys and girls. The third and final chapter further examines risk aversion as one of the sources of within-household differences in parental demand for children's higher education. Consistent with the documented evidence of a non-unitary model of household decision-making, I find that both fathers' and mothers' risk aversion significantly decrease children's tendency to enroll in higher education, although the effects depend critically on the distribution of intra-household bargaining power. Furthermore, parental risk aversion also affects children's labor market entry upon high school graduation. Overall, these findings highlight the roles of parental risk preferences and intra-household bargaining dynamics as important mechanisms that contribute to intergenerational persistence in economic outcomes.

Essays on Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality in Economic History

Essays on Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality in Economic History PDF Author: James Feigenbaum
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation explores intergenerational mobility and inequality in the early twentieth century. The first chapter asks whether economic downturns increase or decrease mobility. I estimate the effect of the Great Depression on mobility, linking a sample of fathers before the Depression to their sons in 1940. I find that the Great Depression lowered intergenerational mobility for sons growing up in cities hit by large downturns. The effects are driven by differential, selective migration: the sons of richer fathers are able to move to better destinations. The second chapter compares historic rates of intergenerational mobility to today. Based on a sample matched from the Iowa 1915 State Census to the 1940 Federal Census, I argue that there was more mobility in the early twentieth century than is found in contemporary data, whether measured using intergenerational elasticities, rank-rank correlations, educational persistence, or occupational status measures. In the third chapter, I detail the machine learning method used to create the linked census samples used in chapters 1 and 2. I use a supervised learning approach to record linkage, training a matching algorithm on hand-linked historical data which is able to efficiently and accurately find links in noisy in historical data.

Three Essays on Intergenerational Mobility in the U.S.

Three Essays on Intergenerational Mobility in the U.S. PDF Author: Maximilian Hell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The papers in this dissertation investigate the patterns and consequence of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, I examine changes in the share of Black and white children earning more than their parents. I find that declines in absolute income mobility for Black children, from 92% to 41% between 1940 and 1987 birth cohorts, are steeper than for whites. In the preferred specification, the racial gap increases from 2 to 8 pp. For Black men, a principal driver of low mobility is their high rate of institutionalization. For white women, family formation plays a key role in achieving upward mobility. Black women have much higher mobility in individual income, but not in family income. Mobility declines are largest in the South, where Black parental income was particularly low in the early cohorts. Second, I investigate the consequences of class mobility for people's beliefs. Do children growing up in a particular class retain its beliefs? And is the process of moving between classes itself associated with shifts in beliefs? I find evidence that people's values show relatively strong, and their material interests comparatively weak associations with parental class. Moreover, people who move from one class to another are more likely to hold the beliefs of the higher-status class across a number of domains, such that the upwardly mobile are more tolerant, the downwardly mobile more hostile to redistribution. I also find evidence for resentment regarding political ideology, where mobility is associated with lower chances of holding the beliefs of the higher-status class. Third, I analyze whether changes in educational stratification have resulted in greater parental influence on people's level of social distrust. Compared to own education, has parental education grown in significance? I find evidence that men, for whom educational expansion has stalled, saw increases in the relative weight of parental education on social distrust. At the same time, women saw continued increases in educational attainment and decreases in the weight of parental background, relative to their own educational attainment.

Three Essays on Intergenerational Mobility

Three Essays on Intergenerational Mobility PDF Author: Minghao Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The study of intergenerational mobility has a long history in the social sciences. Previous studies have proposed various mobility concepts, striven to overcome empirical barriers to achieve accurate national measures, and mapped out cross-country patterns and time trends of mobility. The three essays in dissertation contribute to a recent strand of this literature which seeks to understand the mechanisms through which social status is transmitted across generations. After an overall introduction in chapter one, chapter two uses recently published county-level data to study the determinants of intergenerational mobility, measured by income levels and teen birth rates. Following Solons mobility model, we study the impacts of public investment in human capital, returns to human capital, and taxation. The results show that better school quality and higher returns to education increase adult incomes and reduce teen birth rates for children from low income families. By comparing counties within or adjacent to metropolitan areas to other counties, this study finds that urban upward mobility is sensitive to parents' education while non-urban upward mobility is sensitive to migration opportunities.Chapter three employs court-ordered School Finance Reforms (SFRs) as quasi-experiments to quantify the effects of education equity on intergenerational mobility within commuting zones. First, I use reduced form difference-in-difference analysis to show that 10 years of exposure to SFRs increases the average college attendance rate by about 5.2% for children with the lowest parent income. The effect of exposure to SFRs decreases with parent income and increases with the duration of exposure. Second, to directly model the causal pathways, I construct a measure for education inequity based on the association between school district education expenditure and median family income. Using exposure to SFRs as the instrumental variable, 2SLS analysis suggests that one standard deviation reduction in education inequality will cause the average college attendance rate to increase by 2.2% for children at the lower end of the parent income spectrum. Placing the magnitudes of these effects in context, I conclude that policies aimed at increasing education equity, such as SFRs, can substantially benefit poor children but they alone are not enough to overcome the high degree of existing inequalities.Chapter four studies the Intergenerational Persistence of Self-employment in China across the Planned Economy Era. It finds that children whose parents were self-employed before Chinas socialist transformation were more likely to become self-employed themselves after the economic reform even though they had no direct exposure to their parents businesses. The effect is found in both urban and rural areas, but only for sons. Furthermore, asset holding data indicate that households with self-employed parents before the socialist transformation were more risk tolerant. These findings suggest that the taste for self-employment is an important conduit of parents effects on self-employment, and that the taste being transferred can be mapped to known entrepreneurial attitudes.

The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty

The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty PDF Author: David Brady
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199914052
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 937

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty builds a common scholarly ground in the study of poverty by bringing together an international, inter-disciplinary group of scholars to provide their perspectives on the issue. Contributors engage in discussions about the leading theories and conceptual debates regarding poverty, the most salient topics in poverty research, and the far-reaching consequences of poverty on the individual and societal level.

Fair Progress?

Fair Progress? PDF Author: Ambar Narayan
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464812799
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations around the World focuses on an issue that has gotten much attention in the developed world, but will present new data and analysis covering most of the world including developing economies. The analysis considers whether those born in poverty or in prosperity are destined to remain in the same economic circumstances into which they were born, and looks back over a half a century at whether children's lives are better or worse than their parents' in different parts of the world. It suggests local, national, and global actions and policies that can help break the cycle of poverty, paving the way for the next generation to realize their potential and improve their lives.

Essays on Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility

Essays on Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility PDF Author: Christopher Rauh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays on Intergenerational Mobiblity and Equality of Opportunity

Essays on Intergenerational Mobiblity and Equality of Opportunity PDF Author: Juan César Palomino Quintana
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This doctoral dissertation is divided in three chapters. While all of them deal with the measurement and determinants of economic mobility and (in)equality of opportunity, each has a distinct topic and focuses on a special facet of the opportunity and mobility puzzle. One size doesn't t all: A quantile analysis of intergenerational income mobility in the U.S. (1980-2010) Conventional wisdom and previous literature suggest that economic mobility is lower at the tails of the income distribution; however, the few studies that have estimated intergenerational income elasticity (IGE) at di erent points of the distribution in the U.S. were limited by small samples, arrived at disparate results, and had not estimated the trend of elasticity over time. In the rst chapter of this dissertation a large sample of income observations in the 1980-2010 period for the U.S. is built using the PSID database, which allows us to obtain robust quantile estimates of the IGE both for the pooled sample and for each wave. For the pooled sample, the IGE shows a U-shaped relation with the income distribution, with higher values at the tails (0.64 at the tenth percentile and 0.48 at the ninety- fth percentile) and a minimum value {highest mobility- of 0.38 at the seventieth percentile. The trend evolution of the IGE also varies across the income distribution: at the lower and mid quantiles, income mobility increased during the 80s and 90s but declined in the 00s, while for the higher quantiles it remained relatively stable along the whole period. Finally, the impact of education and race on mobility is evaluated. Both factors are found to be important and related to the position at the income distribution...