Essays on the Role of Social Status and Beliefs on Intergenerational Mobility

Essays on the Role of Social Status and Beliefs on Intergenerational Mobility PDF Author: Martín Leites Lamela
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays on the Role of Social Status and Beliefs on Intergenerational Mobility

Essays on the Role of Social Status and Beliefs on Intergenerational Mobility PDF Author: Martín Leites Lamela
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays on the Role of Social Status and Beliefs on Intergenerational Mobility

Essays on the Role of Social Status and Beliefs on Intergenerational Mobility PDF Author: Martín Leites Lamela
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788449055195
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Estos ensayos realizan una contribución teórica y empírica para la mejor comprensión del papel del estatus social en la movilidad intergeneracional de ingresos. Teorías sociológicas enfatizan el papel del estatus social en la persistencia de la desigualdad entre familias, aspecto que ha recibido menor atención en la disciplina económica. Para avanzar en esta dirección, el primer capítulo propone un modelo teórico que analiza cómo el grupo de referencia y la desigualdad ex-ante afectan la movilidad intergeneracional. En base a los supuestos alternativos sugeridos en los hallazgos empíricos recientes, se modela cómo el ingreso del grupo de referencia afecta las decisiones de esfuerzo. Los resultados muestran que el grupo de referencia afecta la desigualdad de resultados económicos entre individuos idénticos con diferentes orígenes sociales. La magnitud y dirección de este efecto dependen de cuatro factores: (a) la composición del grupo de referencia; (b) la forma funcional de la preocupación relativa; (c) la desigualdad ex-ante y las recompensas relativas; (d) las expectativas de esfuerzo y las trayectorias de movilidad. Además, se demuestra que el grupo de referencia conduce a que las decisiones individuales resulten en un subóptimo social. El primer capítulo considera sólo una perspectiva del estatus y se concentra en el papel comparativo del grupo de referencia. Literatura previa sugiere que la preocupación relativa puede involucrar distintas perspectivas. El segundo capítulo considera este aspecto incorporando una dimensión adicional del estatus: las recompensas sociales basadas en cómo otros valoran las acciones visibles. Esta extensión permite analizar cómo juegan ambos motivos estatus de forma aislada y sus interacciones. Se confirma la importancia del estatus social para explicar las decisiones de esfuerzo y se describe qué circunstancias incrementan la persistencia de la desigualdad. Se identifican tres mecanismos, (i) la movilidad podría ser baja porque las personas pobres no son suficientemente motivadas por la composición de su grupo de referencia. (ii) Podrían ser desalentadas por la sociedad al recibir bajas recompensas sociales. (iii) Podrían ser desalentados por las bajas expectativas de esfuerzo de sus pares y sus intentos fallidos de movilidad ascendente. Sin embargo, bajo ciertas circunstancias el motivo estatus puede reducir la desigualdad económica. Este es el caso, cuando los grupos de referencia de las personas de origen social bajo incluyen personas con otros orígenes o cuando las recompensas sociales de la movilidad son altas. Estos resultados sugieren que el supuesto de concavidad o convexidad de la utilidad con respecto al ingreso relativo es un aspecto clave para explicar las respuestas a cambios en el ingreso de referencia. La literatura empírica previa, en general confirma la asimetría de la preocupación relativa pero es ambigua con respecto a su convexidad o concavidad. El tercer capítulo contribuye nueva evidencia sobre cómo el ingreso relativo con respecto al grupo de referencia incide en los niveles de satisfacción con la situación económica, evaluando empíricamente los supuestos de la teoría de la prospección. Además, se analiza cómo algunos aspectos de la personalidad afectan la preocupación relativa. A diferencia de los trabajos previos, se confirma la convexidad para las personas que enfrentan privación relativa, lo cual se corresponde con la sensibilidad decreciente a mayor distancia del ingreso de referencia. Es decir, preocupación relativa es más importante cerca del umbral y la sensibilidad es mayor en la región de privación relativa. Los resultados son consistentes con los supuestos de la teoría de la prospección. Finalmente, se confirma que algunas características de la personalidad afectan la utilidad marginal de las comparaciones de ingreso con respecto al grupo de referencia.

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.

Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting

Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting PDF Author: Timothy Smeeding
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610447549
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Americans like to believe that theirs is the land of opportunity, but the hard facts are that children born into poor families in the United States tend to stay poor and children born into wealthy families generally stay rich. Other countries have shown more success at lessening the effects of inequality on mobility—possibly by making public investments in education, health, and family well-being that offset the private advantages of the wealthy. What can the United States learn from these other countries about how to provide children from disadvantaged backgrounds an equal chance in life? Making comparisons across ten countries, Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting brings together a team of eminent international scholars to examine why advantage and disadvantage persist across generations. The book sheds light on how the social and economic mobility of children differs within and across countries and the impact private family resources, public policies, and social institutions may have on mobility. In what ways do parents pass advantage or disadvantage on to their children? Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting is an expansive exploration of the relationship between parental socioeconomic status and background and the outcomes of their grown children. The authors also address the impact of education and parental financial assistance on mobility. Contributors Miles Corak, Lori Curtis, and Shelley Phipps look at how family economic background influences the outcomes of adult children in the United States and Canada. They find that, despite many cultural similarities between the two countries, Canada has three times the rate of intergenerational mobility as the United States—possibly because Canada makes more public investments in its labor market, health care, and family programs. Jo Blanden and her colleagues explore a number of factors affecting how advantage is transmitted between parents and children in the United States and the United Kingdom, including education, occupation, marriage, and health. They find that despite the two nations having similar rates of intergenerational mobility and social inequality, lack of educational opportunity plays a greater role in limiting U.S. mobility, while the United Kingdom’s deeply rooted social class structure makes it difficult for the disadvantaged to transcend their circumstances. Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook examine cognitive and behavioral school readiness across income groups and find that pre-school age children in both the United States and Britain show substantial income-related gaps in school readiness—driven in part by poorly developed parenting skills among overburdened, low-income families. The authors suggest that the most encouraging policies focus on both school and home interventions, including such measures as increases in federal funding for Head Start programs in the United States, raising pre-school staff qualifications in Britain, and parenting programs in both countries. A significant step forward in the study of intergenerational mobility, Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting demonstrates that the transmission of advantage or disadvantage from one generation to the next varies widely from country to country. This striking finding is a particular cause for concern in the United States, where the persistence of disadvantage remains stubbornly high. But, it provides a reason to hope that by better understanding mobility across the generations abroad, we can find ways to do better at home.

Three Essays on Social Interactions and Intergenerational Mobility

Three Essays on Social Interactions and Intergenerational Mobility PDF Author: Alejandro Gaviria Trujillo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drug abuse and crime
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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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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Book Description
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.

Three Essays on Intergenerational Mobility

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

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Book Description
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.

Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting

Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting PDF Author: Timothy Smeeding
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 9780871540317
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Americans like to believe that theirs is the land of opportunity, but the hard facts are that children born into poor families in the United States tend to stay poor and children born into wealthy families generally stay rich. Other countries have shown more success at lessening the effects of inequality on mobility—possibly by making public investments in education, health, and family well-being that offset the private advantages of the wealthy. What can the United States learn from these other countries about how to provide children from disadvantaged backgrounds an equal chance in life? Making comparisons across ten countries, Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting brings together a team of eminent international scholars to examine why advantage and disadvantage persist across generations. The book sheds light on how the social and economic mobility of children differs within and across countries and the impact private family resources, public policies, and social institutions may have on mobility. In what ways do parents pass advantage or disadvantage on to their children? Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting is an expansive exploration of the relationship between parental socioeconomic status and background and the outcomes of their grown children. The authors also address the impact of education and parental financial assistance on mobility. Contributors Miles Corak, Lori Curtis, and Shelley Phipps look at how family economic background influences the outcomes of adult children in the United States and Canada. They find that, despite many cultural similarities between the two countries, Canada has three times the rate of intergenerational mobility as the United States—possibly because Canada makes more public investments in its labor market, health care, and family programs. Jo Blanden and her colleagues explore a number of factors affecting how advantage is transmitted between parents and children in the United States and the United Kingdom, including education, occupation, marriage, and health. They find that despite the two nations having similar rates of intergenerational mobility and social inequality, lack of educational opportunity plays a greater role in limiting U.S. mobility, while the United Kingdom’s deeply rooted social class structure makes it difficult for the disadvantaged to transcend their circumstances. Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook examine cognitive and behavioral school readiness across income groups and find that pre-school age children in both the United States and Britain show substantial income-related gaps in school readiness—driven in part by poorly developed parenting skills among overburdened, low-income families. The authors suggest that the most encouraging policies focus on both school and home interventions, including such measures as increases in federal funding for Head Start programs in the United States, raising pre-school staff qualifications in Britain, and parenting programs in both countries. A significant step forward in the study of intergenerational mobility, Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting demonstrates that the transmission of advantage or disadvantage from one generation to the next varies widely from country to country. This striking finding is a particular cause for concern in the United States, where the persistence of disadvantage remains stubbornly high. But, it provides a reason to hope that by better understanding mobility across the generations abroad, we can find ways to do better at home.

Unequal Chances

Unequal Chances PDF Author: Samuel Bowles
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691136203
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
'Unequal Chances' explores the influence of family background on the achievement of economic success in the US. Contributors discuss education, genetic inheritance of IQ, racial influences, inheritance of wealth, and parent-offspring similarities in personality and behaviour.

Education and Social Mobility

Education and Social Mobility PDF Author: Phillip Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317311647
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The study of education and social mobility has been a key area of sociological research since the 1950s. The importance of this research derives from the systematic analysis of functionalist theories of industrialism. Functionalist theories assume that the complementary demands of efficiency and justice result in more ‘meritocratic’ societies, characterized by high rates of social mobility. Much of the sociological evidence has cast doubt on this optimistic, if not utopian, claim that reform of the education system could eliminate the influence of class, gender and ethnicity on academic performance and occupational destinations. This book brings together sixteen cutting-edge articles on education and social mobility. It also includes an introductory essay offering a guide to the main issues and controversies addressed by authors from several countries. This comprehensive volume makes an important contribution to our theoretical and empirical understanding of the changing relationship between origins, education and destinations. This timely collection is?also relevant to policy-makers as education and social mobility are firmly back on both national and global political agendas, viewed as key to creating fairer societies and more competitive economies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.