Intergenerational Mobility in Theory
Channel: MilesCorak
Date: 2020-03-19

This is Lecture 6 of a course called "Inequality, Economic Opportunity, and Public Policy" that I taught in the Department of Economics at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.


The lecture examines the influential theoretical model of intergenerational mobility published by Gary Becker and Nigel Tomes in 1986, offering an overview of the theory, some predictions it makes, and some directions it suggests for future research. Most importantly we learn in this lecture about the different forces that come together to determine the degree of intergenerational mobility, and how they might help us in understanding differences across time and space. The model more precisely defines how the family, the market, and the state come together to determine the degree of regression to the mean in parent and child incomes.


This narrated presentation was made for a class held in March 2020.