African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility Since 1880

Abstract

We document the intergenerational mobility of black and white American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new historical datasets and combining them with modern data to cover the middle and late twentieth century. We find large disparities, with white children having far better chances of escaping the bottom of the income distribution than black children in every generation. This mobility gap was more important in proximately determining each generation's racial income gap than was the gap in parents' economic status. Evidence suggests that human capital disparities, conditional on parents' status, underpinned a substantial part of the mobility gap.

Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of “Rugged Individualism” in the United States

“…A true match is defined as one with a sufficiently high score both in absolute and relative terms. The match rate was 25 percent, which is comparable with the rates achieved by recent studies linking records with broadly comparable data albeit different target populations (e.g., 29 percent inAbramitzky et al, 2012; 26 percent inCollins and Wanamaker, 2017; and 22 percent in Long and Ferrie, 2013). Although matching on names leaves scope for sample selection, the results look similar when reweighting using the odds of being linked across Census rounds (followingBailey et al, forthcoming).…”

The Economic Assimilation of Irish Famine Migrants to the United States

“…to later periods (Long and Ferrie 2013). Movement toward the mean from the bottom of the occupational distribution was fairly common for low-status whites, but such strong convergence is neither mechanical nor to be taken for granted, as evidenced by the history of black men's intergenerational mobility (Collins and Wanamaker 2017).…”

Distributional Effects of a Continuous Treatment with an Application on Intergenerational Mobility

“…The intergenerational elasticity (IGE), which is the slope coefficient from a regression of the log of child's income on the log of parents’ income, has a long history in the intergenerational income mobility literature. But recent work has considered more complicated setups such as: (i) transition matrices; (ii) the probability that child's income is greater than parents’ income; and (iii) the correlation of the ranks of child's income and parents’ income, among other ideas (Jantti et al ., ; Bhattacharya and Mazumder, ; Murtazashvili, ; Chetty et al ., 2014a,b; Murtazashvili, Liu and Prokhorov, ; An, Le and Xiao, ; Chetty et al ., ; Collins and Wanamaker, ; Kitagawa, Nybom and Stuhler, ).…”