Do Grandparents and Great-Grandparents Matter? Multigenerational Mobility in the US, 1910-2013

Abstract

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The Not-So-Hot Melting Pot: The Persistence of Outcomes for Descendants of the Age of Mass Migration

“…The paper is also related to the fast-growing literature on multigenerational mobility (Solon 2018), some of which uses historical US censuses (e.g., Ferrie, Massey, and Rothbaum 2016;Long and Ferrie 2018;Olivetti, Paserman, and Salisbury 2018). 10 While most of this literature focuses on how grandfather and grandson outcomes are correlated, I extend it by showing that the grandson's outcomes are further associated with co-ethnic outcomes from 60 years prior.…”

“…3 Yet ethnic-specific causal factors are not the only possible explanation for intergenerational drag; for instance, it may be that immigrants lived in poorer neighborhoods that had negative effects on subsequent generations through general education or health mechanisms. Another possibility is that there was no causal mechanism driving stronger persistence at the ethnic level, but that the result is due to measurement error: that is, the estimated grandfather-grandson association is smaller than the true association because it is subject to attenuation bias (e.g., Clark 2014;Ferrie, Massey, and Rothbaum 2016;Solon 1992). Given measurement error, the ethnic mean would serve as a useful proxy for the father's true occupational status and thus would be positively correlated with the next generation's outcomes despite having no causal effect.…”

Historical Census Record Linkage

“…Ward (2017) examines occupational mobility over three generations, by linking foreign-born grandfathers in the 1880 census to sons in 1910 and grandsons in 1940, finding that the skill level of the grandfather had a powerful impact on the skill level of his grandchildren. Ferrie, Massey and Rothbaum (2016) extend multigenerational analysis even farther, by linking the 1910, 1920, and 1940 censuses to internal versions of Census Bureau surveys from the 1970s to the 2010s. By using Social Security records, the authors were able to obtain maiden names, allowing intergenerational record linkage for women as well as men.…”

The production of inequalities within families and across generations: the intergenerational effects of birth order and family size on educational attainment

“…However, recent work suggests that grandparental effects may be an artifact of measurement error (Lundberg, 2018), particularly at the parental level (Ferrie, Massey, and Rothbaum, 2016). After such attenuation-inducing error is corrected, evidence of a multigenerational transmission of status disappears, and stratification seems to follow a two-generation Markovian model (Ferrie et al, 2016).…”

“…However, recent work suggests that grandparental effects may be an artifact of measurement error (Lundberg, 2018), particularly at the parental level (Ferrie, Massey, and Rothbaum, 2016). After such attenuation-inducing error is corrected, evidence of a multigenerational transmission of status disappears, and stratification seems to follow a two-generation Markovian model (Ferrie et al, 2016). Within this literature the multigenerational impact of demographic factors within the family has received much less attention than the multigenerational impact of socioeconomic conditions (Mare, 2011).…”