long term intergenerational persistence of human capital an empirical analysis of four generations most previous studies of intergenerational transmission of human capital are restricted to two generations how parents influence their children in this study we use a swedish data set that links individual measures of lifetime earnings for three generations and data on educational attainment for four generations we find that estimates obtained from data on two generations severely underestimate long run intergenerational persistence in both labor earnings and educational attainments long run social mobility is hence much lower than previously thought we attribute this additional persistence to dynastic human capital the influence on human capital of more distant family members than parents

do merging local governments free ride on their counterparts when facing boundary reform the western world exhibited a significant trend towards larger local governments in the twentieth century which was driven to a large extent by boundary reforms boundary reforms can provide economic benefits but may also give rise to costs driven by opportunistic political behavior this study uses a swedish compulsory reform to test for such behavior the reform gives a local government the incentive to accumulate debt before a merger takes place since the taxpayers in the new locality will share the cost the strength of the incentive to free ride is determined by the population size of the initial locality relative to that of the new locality i find an economically large and statistically significant free riding effect

asset returns and business cycles in models with investment adjustment costs we show that adjustment cost models with labor supply can explain both asset returns and business cycle facts when adjustment costs penalize the changes of investment this conclusion stands in contrast to results obtained in the literature with adjustment costs that penalize the changes of capital

social class family background and intergenerational mobility abstract this research examines the various approaches taken by economists and sociologists for analyzing intergenerational mobility social mobility models based on social classes arising from an occupational classification scheme are analysed a test for the statistical validity of classification schemes is proposed and tested using danish sample survey data that was first collected in 1976 and augmented in 2000 this is referred to as a homogeneity test and is a likelihood ratio test of a set of linear restrictions which define social classes for denmark it is shown that this test fails for an erikson goldthorpe classification system raising doubts about the statistical validity of occupational classification systems in general we also estimate regression models of occupational earnings household earnings and educational attainment using family background variables as covariates controlling for unobservables measurement error and simultaneous equation bias in these models homogeneity tests are also rejected we conclude from these results that the individual s family background has a small but significant impact on lifetime chances which is not captured by the erikson goldthorpe classification scheme

intergenerational economic mobility in the united states 1940 to 2000 we estimate trends in intergenerational economic mobility by matching men in the census to synthetic parents in the prior generation we find that mobility increased from 1950 to 1980 but has declined sharply since 1980 while our estimator places greater weight on location effects than the standard intergenerational coefficient the size of the bias appears to be small our preferred results suggest that earnings are regressing to the mean more slowly now than at any time since world war ii causing economic differences between families to become more persistent however current rates of positional mobility appear historically normal

head start and the distribution of long term education and labor market outcomes we investigate the effect of head start on education and wage income for individuals in their 30s in the nlsy79 we contribute to the existing literature by examining effects across outcome distrib

correlations of brothers earnings and intergenerational transmission correlations between parent and child earnings reflect intergenerational mobility and more broadly correlations between siblings earnings reflect shared community and family background these earnings relationships capture important aspects of relations in socioeconomic status more generally we estimate intergenerational transmission and sibling correlations of life cycle earnings jointly within a unified framework that nests previous models using data on the danish population of father first son second son triads we find that intergenerational effects account for on average 72 percent of sibling correlations this share is higher than all previous studies because we allow for heterogeneous intergenerational transmission between families sibling correlations exhibit a u shape over the working life consistent with differences in human capital investments between families

is there a penalty for registered women is there a premium for registered men evidence from a sample of transsexual workers abstract in this paper we study the earnings of transsexual workers using a large administrative sample drawn from the dutch labor force in particular we make two comparisons first we compare transsexual workers to other women and men and find that they earn more than women and less than men second we compare transsexual workers before and after their administrative gender transition and find that male to female transsexual workers earn less as registered women and female to male transsexual workers earn as much if not marginally more as registered men these patterns hold for annual and hourly earnings and do not change when we account for individual fixed effects together our results are consistent with a labor market model in which transsexual workers are discriminated against as a registered female as well as a lgbt worker

earnings instability and earnings inequality of males in the united states 1967 1991 although much research has focused on recent increases in annual earnings inequality in the united states the increases could have come from either of two sources the distribution of lifetime earnings could have become more unequal or the receipt of lifetime earnings could have become more unstable based on an analysis of the 1968 92 panel study of income dynamics we find that lifetime earnings inequality increased during the early 1980s and that earnings instability increased during the 1970s we also examine how these trends are related to changes in the distribution of wages and hours and the returns to education

long term effects of class size this article evaluates the long term effects of class size in primary school we use rich data from sweden and exploit variation in class size created by a maximum class size rule smaller classes in the last three years of primary school age 10 to 13 are beneficial for cognitive and noncognitive ability at age 13 and improve achievement at age 16 most important we find that smaller classes have positive effects on completed education wages and earnings at age 27 to 42 the estimated wage effect is large enough to pass a cost benefit test

mismatch of talent evidence on match quality entry wages and job mobility we examine the impact of mismatch on entry wages separations and wage growth using unique data on worker talents we show that workers are sorted on comparative advantage across jobs within occup

alcohol availability prenatal conditions and long term economic outcomes this study examines how a policy that sharply increased alcohol availability during 8 5 months affected the labor productivity of those exposed to it in utero compared to the surrounding cohorts the prenatally exposed children have substantially worse labor market and educational outcomes and lower cognitive and noncognitive ability effects on earnings are found throughout the distribution but are largest below the median males are more affected than females consistent with growing evidence that boys are less resilient to early environmental insults the long term effects seem primarily driven by changes in prenatal health rather than changes in the childhood environment

growth rate heterogeneity and the covariance structure of life cycle earnings using u s panel data on adult males i compare the profile heterogeneity model of earnings dynamics in which the earnings experience profile varies across individuals to a competing model in which earnings has a unit root the latter specification enjoys increasing popularity among researchers my analysis questions this favor suggesting the profile heterogeneity model provides a more consistent representation of the data i also provide new estimates of the variation in earnings growth rates previous evidence is from relatively unrepresentative samples individuals one standard deviation above the mean enjoy a 20 30 earnings advantage in just 10 years

rich dad smart dad decomposing the intergenerational transmission of income we construct a simple model consistent with becker and tomes that decomposes the intergenerational income elasticity into the causal effect of financial resources the mechanistic transmission of human capital and the role that human capital plays in the determination of fathers permanent incomes we show how a particular set of instrumental variables could separately identify the money and human capital transmission effects using data from a 35 percent sample of swedish sons and their fathers we show that only a minority of the intergenerational income elasticity can be plausibly attributed to the causal effect of fathers financial resources

calibrating capital adjustment costs in the new keynesian model abstract we draw on the literature on dynamic factor demand equations to provide evidence for the calibration of capital adjustment costs in the new keynesian model the findings support previous work which shows that for a wide range of values of the capital adjustment cost parameter the new keynesian model gives plausible estimates of the degree of price stickiness

trends in intergenerational income mobility previous studies of recent u s trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results partly because of large sampling errors by making more efficient use of the available information in the panel study of income dynamics we generate more reliable estimates of the recent time series variation in intergenerational mobility our results which pertain to the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975 do not reveal major changes in intergenerational mobility

common pool size and project size an empirical test on expenditures using danish municipal mergers the paper examines the proposition from the law of 1 over n weingast et al 1981 that project size tends to increase with common pool size comparable studies have tended firstly to focus on assets and debt rather than on expenditures and secondly on district population rather than on the number of districts as in the original formulation of the law both issues are sought to be remedied in this paper the proposition is examined on danish municipal expenditures from 1996 to 2006 using municipal mergers towards the end of this period as a quasi experiment a difference in difference identification strategy and a subsample strategy are used to identify the effect of the availability and size of a common pool on municipal expenditures the paper finds positive statistically and economically significant effects of the availability and size of a common pool in the final year of the treatment period the importance of the number of districts over district population suggests a reappraisal of the law of 1 over n as originally formulated

biases in standard measures of intergenerational income dependence abstract estimates of the most common mobility measure the intergenerational elasticity can be severely biased if snapshots are used to approximate lifetime income however little is known about biases in other popular dependence measures using long swedish income series we provide such evidence for log linear and rank correlations and rank based transition probabilities attenuation bias is considerably weaker in rank based measures life cycle bias is strongest in the elasticity moderate in log linear correlations and small in rank based measures however there are important exceptions persistence in the tails of the distribution is considerably higher and long distance downward mobility lower than estimates from short run income suggest

returns to skills around the world evidence from piaac abstract existing estimates of the labor market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies international comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital and evidence incorporating direct measures of cognitive skills is mostly restricted to early career workers in the united states analysis of the new piaac survey of adult skills over the full lifecycle in 23 countries shows that the focus on early career earnings leads to underestimating the lifetime returns to skills by about one quarter on average a one standard deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 18 percent wage increase among prime age workers but this masks considerable heterogeneity across countries eight countries including all nordic countries have returns between 12 and 15 percent while six are above 21 percent with the largest return being 28 percent in the united states estimates are remarkably robust to different earnings and skill measures additional controls and various subgroups instrumental variable models that use skill variation stemming from school attainment parental education or compulsory schooling laws provide even higher estimates intriguingly returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density stricter employment protection and larger public sector shares

on the variability of income within and across generations we examine the association of income variability both within and across generations based on a heterogeneous growth model of permanent and transitory income in sweden non parametric regressions reveal that income variability is strongly associated with long run levels of income especially for low and high income earners and that it is also strongly associated across generations

heterogeneous income profiles and lifecycle bias in intergenerational mobility estimation using short snapshots of income in intergenerational mobility estimation causes lifecycle bias if the snapshots cannot mimic lifetime outcomes we use uniquely long series of swedish income data to show that this bias is large and to examine current strategies to reduce it we confirm that lifecycle bias is smallest when incomes are measured around midlife a central implication from a widely adopted generalization of the classical errors in variables model however the model cannot predict the ideal age of measurement or eliminate lifecycle bias at other ages we illustrate how extensions of this model can reduce the bias further

the finnish great depression from russia with love during the period 1991 93 finland experienced the deepest economic downturn in an industrialized country since the 1930s we argue that the collapse of the finnish trade with the soviet union in and of itself resulted in a large contraction of the economy and a costly restructuring of the manufacturing sector similar to the transition suffered by countries in eastern europe finland and these transition countries show almost identical u shaped dynamics of output in the early 1990s yet as a western democracy with fully developed capital markets and well functioning legal and political institutions finland faced none of the large institutional adjustments experienced in the formerly centrally planned economies thus by studying the finnish experience we can isolate the adjustment costs due solely to the collapse of trade from the other burdens of adjustment borne by transition economies we develop and calibrate a multisector dynamic general equilibrium model of the finnish economy and show that the collapse of soviet finnish trade can indeed go a long way in explaining finland s great depression

the intergenerational transmission of employers we find that about 40 of a cohort of young canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked and 6 9 have the same employer in adulthood the intergenerational transmission of employers is positively related to paternal earnings particularly at the very top of the earnings distribution and to the presence of self employment income and the number of employers with which the father has had direct contact it has an important influence on nonlinear patterns in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings

the evolution of social mobility norway during the twentieth century we document trends in social mobility in norway using intergenerational income elasticities the associations between the income percentiles of fathers and sons and brother correlations the results of all approaches suggest that social mobility increased substantially between cohorts born in the early 1930s and the early 1940s father son associations remained stable for cohorts born after world war ii while brother correlations continued to decline the relationship between father and son income percentile ranks is highly non linear for early cohorts but it approaches linearity over time we discuss increasing educational attainment among low and middle income families as a possible mechanism underlying these trends

adolescent time preferences predict lifetime outcomes this study investigates the relationship between time preferences and lifetime social and economic outcomes we use a swedish longitudinal data set that links information from a large survey on children s time preferences at age 13 to administrative registers spanning over five decades our results indicate a substantial adverse relationship between high discount rates and school performance health labour supply and lifetime income males and high ability children gain significantly more from being future oriented these discrepancies are largest regarding outcomes later in life we also show that the relationship between time preferences and long run outcomes operates through early human capital investments

jurisdiction size and local government policy expenditure assessing the effect of municipal amalgamation across the developed world the last 50 years have seen a dramatic wave of municipal mergers often motivated by a quest for economies of scale re examining the theoretical arguments invoked to justify these reforms we find that in fact there is no compelling reason to expect them to yield net gains potential savings in for example administrative costs are likely to be offset by opposite effects for other domains past attempts at empirical assessment have been bedeviled by endogeneity which municipalities amalgamate is typically nonrandom creating a danger of bias we exploit the particular characteristics of a recent danish reform to provide more credible difference in differences estimates of the effect of mergers the result turns out to be null cost savings in some areas were offset by deterioration in others while for most public services jurisdiction size did not matter at all given significant transition costs the finding raises questions about the rationale behind a global movement that has already restructured local government on almost all continents

does money matter for intergenerational income transmission the intergenerational income elasticity iie is a crucial measure of income mobility in this article we develop a structural model to examine the channels through which this elasticity operates using data from the panel study of income dynamics we separately identify the human capital and the financial components the human capital component examines the transmission of human capital independent of financial investments whereas the financial component examines the impact of income that is uncorrelated with human capital that is exogenous income using a two stage framework we show that the iie operates through both channels moreover our estimates show that the financial component may have a larger effect than previously estimated plausibly attributing to 36 of intergenerational income transmission indeed this result holds even when the financial component is defined in an incredibly narrow manner this suggests that cash payments could promote intergenerational mobility

cross country rankings in intergenerational mobility a comparison of approaches from economics and sociology this paper summarizes research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility whether classified by income education or social class the literatures on education and income mobility reveal a similar ranking with south america other developing nations southern european countries and france tending to have rather limited mobility although the nordic countries exhibit strong mobility estimates of mobility based on social class point to rather different patterns and we demonstrate that these differences are most likely generated by intergenerational earnings persistence within social classes the second part of the paper looks for explanations for the differences in earnings and education persistence and finds that mobility is negatively correlated with inequality and the return to education but positively correlated with a nation s education spending

the political economy of benefits and costs a neoclassical approach to distributive politics this essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions the model emphasizes the economically arbitrary from a welfare point of view importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation we explore the implications of a legislator s objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale

family background and income during the rise of the welfare state brother correlations in income for swedish men born 1932 1968 we investigate if the association between family background and income in sweden has changed for men born between 1932 and 1968 our main finding is that the share of the variance in long run income that is attributable to family background the so called brother correlation in income has fallen by some 17 from 0 49 for the cohorts of brothers born in the early 1930s to below 0 32 for the cohorts born around 1950 from then on the correlations have inched back up to around 0 37 we report suggestive evidence that the decline is driven by changes in education

measuring factor adjustment costs i estimate adjustment costs for labor and capital from the euler equations for factor demand for both factors i find relatively strong evidence against substantial adjustment costs my estimates use annual data from two digit industries my results support the view that rents arising from adjustment costs are relatively small and are not an important part of the explanation of the large movements of the values of corporations in relation to the reproduction costs of their capital i investigate the potential effects of three types of specification error 1 aggregation over time 2 aggregation over firms with heterogeneous demand shocks and 3 estimation of a convex adjustment cost technology in the presence of nonconvex discrete adjustment costs i find that the likely biases from these specification errors are relatively small

blowing up money the earnings penalty of smoking in the 1970s and the 21st century abstract we analyze the earnings penalty of smoking among swedish twins in two social contexts the 1970s when smoking was common and widely accepted and when there were relatively few tobacco laws aiming to reduce smoking and the 2000s when smoking had become more expensive stigmatizing and less common and when tobacco laws and regulations had intensified the results show that the short term earnings penalty of smoking was much higher in the 21st century than in the 1970s for men for women smokers had on average higher annual earnings compared to nonsmokers in the 1970s but lower annual earnings in the 2000s in the long run there was an earnings gap for men between never smokers and continuous smokers whereas there was a pronounced earnings bonus of smoking cessation for women the results emphasize the importance of social context and the long term horizon when evaluating the consequences of smoking for earnings

on the stability of age earnings profiles age earnings profiles are compared across three countries japan sweden and the united states dynamic changes in period age and cohort characteristics and permanent differences across countries are discussed observed differences in profiles are explained partly by intertemporal country differences in the labor market situation and partly by institutional differences

dynamic factor demands and the effects of energy price shocks a dynamic model is used to understand how sharp changes in energy prices affect investment behavior employment and energy use the authors discuss the theory behind their model selection model specifications estimation methods and data list parameter estimates and elasticities for the selected model and describe the simulations they conclude that 1 the data strongly reject the hypothesis of constant returns to scale within their specification of aggregate production 2 the data indicate adjustment costs on labor are small and 3 their results help reconcile some of the conflicting estimates of energy demand elasticities appearing in recent literature 23 references 3 figures 3 tables

snapshots versus movies empirical studies of the intergenerational inheritance of economic status should use observations on complete lifetime status profiles of parents and children to be consistent with underlying theory but they cannot only snapshots rather than movies on status are currently available in samples estimates of the degree of intergenerational inheritance may therefore be subject to lifecycle biases the paper investigates these in the context of a lifecycle earnings model and shows that these biases may be large that their direction varies and that correction methods suggested hitherto have questionable reliability until more complete data sets become available researchers should be more temperate in the conclusions they draw

life cycle variations in the association between current and lifetime income replication and extension for sweden we apply haider and solon s generalized errors in variables model to swedish income tax data to produce estimates of the association between current and lifetime income our estimates demonstrate strong life cycle patterns this implies that the widespread use of current income as a proxy for lifetime income leads to inconsistent parameter estimates i e life cycle bias even when the proxy is used as the dependent variable estimates for comparable cohorts of swedish and american men demonstrate surprising similarities there are however significant gender and cohort differences in this association that lead to statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful differences in life cycle biases

measuring long term inequality of opportunity abstract in this paper we introduce a new family of rank dependent measures of inequality and social welfare consistent with the equality of opportunity eop principle the proposed framework can be used to measure long term as well as short term eop depending on whether we let permanent income or snapshots of income form the basis of the analysis furthermore it allows for both an ex ante and an ex post approach to eop there is long term ex post inequality of opportunity if individuals who exert the same effort have different permanent incomes in comparison the ex ante approach focuses on differences in the expected permanent income between groups of individuals with identical circumstances to demonstrate the empirical relevance of a long run perspective on eop we exploit a unique panel data from norway on individuals incomes over their working life span this allows us to examine how well analysis of opportunity inequality based on snapshots of income approximate the results based on permanent income

a nonparametric nonclassical measurement error approach to estimating intergenerational mobility elasticities this article provides a framework for estimating intergenerational mobility elasticities iges of children s income with respect to parental income we allow the iges to be heterogeneous by leavi

lifetime income and housing affordability in singapore most commonly used measures of housing affordability are essentially short run indicators that compare current income with house prices or housing costs despite the emphasis in the literature on t

trends in life expectancy by income and the role of specific causes of death this study explores how life expectancy at age 35 has evolved across the income distribution in sweden over time we examine individual income for men 1970 2007 and family income for both men and women 1980 2007 during this period income inequality increased in most western countries but especially so in sweden drawing on a large sample of the swedish population our results show that the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest fifths of the income distribution also increased this was the case both for individual and family income the increase was larger for men than for women but the only group with stagnant life expectancy at age 35 was women in the lowest income quintile group between 1986 and 2007 the difference between the lowest and highest family income quintiles increased by about one year for women and by almost two years for men the causes of death that most significantly contributed to the increased disparities among women were circulatory and respiratory diseases for men circulatory disease mortality alone caused most of the increased disparities

decomposing economic mobility transition matrices the intergenerational mobility literature has consistently found that the distribution of adult economic outcomes differ markedly depending on parental economic status yet much remains to be understood about the drivers or determinants of this relationship existing literature on potential drivers focuses primarily on mean effects to help provide a more complete picture of the potential forces driving economic persistence we propose a method to decompose transition matrices and related indices specifically we decompose differences between an estimated transition matrix and a benchmark transition matrix into portions attributable to differences in characteristics between individuals from different households a composition effect and portions attributable to differing returns to these characteristics between individuals from different households a structure effect we also incorporate a detailed decomposition based on copula theory that decomposes the composition effect into portions attributable to specific covariates and their interactions we illustrate our method using data on white men from the 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth estimation is based on an extended mincer equation that includes cognitive and non cognitive measures to address the potential endogeneity of education we implement an iv strategy that allows us to estimate causal effects and investigate the role of unobserved ability

intergenerational earnings persistence and economic inequality in the long run evidence from french cohorts 1931 75 this paper analyses long term trends in intergenerational earnings persistence in france for male cohorts born between 1931 and 1975 this time period has witnessed important changes in the french labour market and educational system in particular an important compression of earnings differentials as well as a large expansion in access to secondary and higher education using a two sample instrumental variables approach i estimate two measures of intergenerational economic persistence the intergenerational earnings elasticity ige and the intergenerational correlation igc over the period the ige exhibits a v shaped pattern it falls from a high of value of 0 6 for cohorts born in the 1930s to around 0 4 for those born in the 1950s but subsequently rises to a level close to that at the beginning of the period in contrast the igc remains relatively stable over the period this suggests that changes in the ige are partly driven by transitory responses to changes in cross sectional inequality rather than long term changes in the degree of intergenerational persistence

height and earnings the role of cognitive and noncognitive skills we use large scale register data on 450 000 swedish males who underwent mandatory military enlistment at age 18 and a subsample of 150 000 siblings to examine why tall people earn more we show the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills as well as family background and muscular strength for the height earnings relationship in addition we show that a substantial height premium remains after these factors have been accounted for which originates from very short people having low earnings this is mostly explained by the sorting of short people into low paid occupations which may indicate discrimination by stature

school tracking and intergenerational income mobility evidence from the finnish comprehensive school reform abstract this paper estimates the effect of a major education reform on intergenerational income mobility the finnish comprehensive school reform of 1972 1977 replaced the old two track school system with a uniform nine year comprehensive school and shifted the selection of students to vocational and academic tracks from age 11 to age 16 we estimate the effect of this reform on the intergenerational income elasticity using a representative sample of males born between 1960 and 1966 the identification strategy relies on a differences in differences approach and exploits the fact that the reform was implemented gradually across the country during a six year period the results indicate that the reform reduced the intergenerational income elasticity by 23 from the pre reform elasticity of 0 30 to post reform elasticity of 0 23

changes in life cycle earnings what do social security data show a matched sample of social security and current population survey records is used to examine life cycle earnings patterns of white males over the 1951 1976 period estimated direct effects of schooling and experience compare well with other studies but interaction effects with cohort do not younger cohorts exhibit smaller marginal returns to schooling and larger marginal returns to experience but differences between cohorts are very small when demographic factors namely veteran status are controlled direct cohort effects are linear in these data and show no tendency to vary with cohort size

lifetime earnings inequality in germany we employ german social security records to investigate intragenerational lifetime earnings inequality and mobility of yearly earnings for 35 cohorts starting with the birth year 1935 our main result is a striking secular rise of intragenerational inequality in lifetime earnings west german men born in the early 1960s are likely to experience about 85 more lifetime inequality than their fathers in contrast both short term and long term intragenerational mobility are stable longer unemployment spells of workers at the bottom of the distribution of younger cohorts contribute to explaining 20 40 of the overall increase in lifetime earnings inequality

new phillips curve under alternative production technologies for canada the united states and the euro area abstract this paper shows that alternative production technologies imply two modifications to the new phillips curve npc a specific strategic complementarity parameter that affects the relationship between real marginal cost and inflation and a specific modification to the labour share measure of real marginal cost estimates of average duration of nominal price stickiness obtained conditional on the strategic complementarity parameter are substantially smaller and therefore more plausible relative to when this parameter is ignored modifications to the marginal cost measure alone have little effect on the npc estimates the empirical fit of the npc under alternative production technologies is similar

changing roles of ability and education in u s intergenerational mobility using data on young adults from the 1979 and 1997 national longitudinal survey of youth we investigate the changing roles of ability and education in the transmission of economic status across generations we find that ability plays a substantially diminished role for the most recent cohort whereas education plays a much larger role the first finding results primarily from a smaller effect of children s ability on status the second from an increased correlation between parental status and educational attainment a replication of the analysis by gender reveals that the changes in the role of ability are largely driven by men whereas the changes in education s role are largely driven by women jel j62 i24

intergenerational top income mobility in sweden capitalist dynasties in the land of equal opportunity this paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility at the top of the income and earnings distributions using a large dataset of matched father son pairs in sweden we find that intergenerational transmission is very strong at the top more so for income than for earnings at the extreme top top 0 1 income transmission is remarkable with an intergenerational elasticity of approximately 0 9 we also study potential transmission mechanisms and find that iq non cognitive skills and education of the sons are all unlikely channels in explaining the strong transmission within the top percentile increases in the income of the fathers if they are related at all are negatively associated with these variables wealth on the other hand has a significantly positive association our results suggest that sweden known for having relatively high intergenerational mobility in general is a society in which transmission remains strong at the very top of the distribution and wealth is the most likely channel

birth weight in the long run we study the effect of birth weight on long run outcomes using data on swedish twins born between 1926 and 1958 linked to administrative records spanning entire life time labor market histories we

the contribution of early life versus labour market factors to intergenerational income persistence a comparison of the uk and sweden we explore whether differences in intergenerational income mobility between the uk and sweden show up early in life finding stronger associations between parental income and birthweight height and school performance in the uk we investigate whether these differentials can account for the country difference in income mobility while differences in the associations in birthweight and height are too weak to matter school performance does account for a substantial part of this difference however country differences in the earnings returns to these skills are at least as important as the differences in the link between parental income and skills