This paper estimates 50-year trends in the intergenerational persistence of educational attainment for a sample of 42 nations around the globe. Large regional differences in educational persistence are documented, with Latin America displaying the highest intergenerational correlations, and the Nordic countries the lowest. We also demonstrate that the global average correlation between parent and child's schooling has held steady at about 0.4 for the past fifty years.

Small-scale human societies range from foraging bands with a strong egalitarian ethos to more economically stratified agrarian and pastoral societies. We explain this variation in inequality using a dynamic model in which a population’s long-run steady-state level of inequality depends on the extent to which its most important forms of wealth are transmitted within families across generations. We estimate the degree of intergenerational transmission of three different types of wealth (material, embodied, and relational) as well as the extent of wealth inequality in 21 historical and contemporary populations. We show that intergenerational transmission of wealth and wealth inequality are substantial among pastoral and small-scale agricultural societies (on a par with or even exceeding the most unequal modern industrial economies) and quite limited among horticultural and foraging peoples (equivalent to the most egalitarian of modern industrial populations). Differences in the technology by which a people derive their livelihood and in the institutions and norms making up the economic system jointly contribute to this pattern.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We find that about 40% of a cohort of young Canadian men has been employed with an employer for whom their father also worked; and six to nine percent 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 selfemployment income and the number of employers with which the father has had direct contact. It has an important influence in determining nonlinear patterns in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings.JEL Classification: J62, J64

This paper adds to the international literature on the extent to which economic status is passed on across generations. Retrospective information in the Bank of Italy repeated crosssection survey may be exploited by applying a two-sample two stage least squares estimation. We estimate the intergenerational income elasticity for Italy. From an overall comparison, the evidence provided in this paper hints at Italy in the low-mobility group among advanced societies in the range of values found in the US and the UK. The analysis of the results allows a characterization of the main patterns in the transmission of economic status in Italy. We find that only a small fraction of the intergenerational coefficient is accounted for by the superior educational attainments of richer children.

This paper uses data from eight past and present societies practicing intensive agriculture to measure the transmission of wealth across generations in preindustrial agricultural societies. Focusing on embodied, material, and relational forms of wealth, we compare levels of wealth between parents and children to estimate how effectively wealth is transmitted from one generation to the next and how inequality in one generation impacts inequality in the next generation. We find that material wealth is by far the most important, unequally distributed, and highly transmitted form of wealth in these societies, while embodied and relational forms of wealth show much weaker importance and transmission. We conclude that the unique characteristics of material wealth, and especially wealth in land, are key to the high and persistent levels of inequality seen in societies practicing intensive agriculture. We explore the implications of our findings for the evolution of inequality in the course of human history and suggest that it is the intensification of agriculture and the accompanying transformation of land into a form of heritable wealth that may allow for the social complexity long associated with agricultural societies.

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