Ethnic and Gender Differences in Intergenerational Mobility: A Study of 26‐year‐olds in the Usa

Abstract

This paper uses the traditional income framework and a non-monetary framework to estimate intergenerational mobility in economic status for a sample of 26 year-old whites, blacks and Hispanics in the USA using data from the first and fifth sweeps of the National Educational Longitudinal Study (1988 and 2000). Intergenerational income mobility is found to be greater for females than for males, though there are differences between whites, blacks and Hispanics. Transition probabilities indicate that Hispanics are the most upwardly mobile in terms of educational attainment and occupational status. Ordered logits are used to estimate the impact of parental education and occupation on educational and occupational outcomes. JEL Classification: J62

Gender in intergenerational educational persistence across time and place

“…First, since income changes through different life stages, obtaining reliable information about lifetime earnings is difficult, at best. Instead, education offers a more straightforward measure of economic and social status that generally remains constant after a certain age (Nguyen et al, 2005), and education can be a better measure of permanent income than income observed at one point or even over the course of several years (Carneiro and Heckman, 2005). Second, reporting income -or any monetary measure -is subject to response bias, in which respondents systematically under-or over-report their income (Bielby et al, 1977).…”

“…Finally, survey respondents, who are generally the descendants in the intergenerational persistence literature, are much more likely to know their parents' level of education than their parents' income at any point in time, producing less recall bias (see e.g. Nguyen et al, 2005;Black and Devereux, 2011). Thus we measure how similar descendants' educational attainment is to their parents '.…”

Intergenerational Mobility in Socio‐economic Status in Ethiopia

“…To examine intergenerational mobility in non-monetary economic status, the paper follows Goldberger (1989) and Nguyen, Haile and Taylor (2005), which compare the occupational and educational statuses of children and their parents. Non-monetary indicators of economic status are likely to be less noisy measures of long-term economic status than earnings because they are less sensitive to transitory shocks (Ermisch & Francesconi, 2002;Nickell, 1982).…”

Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage

“…Similar results are presented in Myers et al (2006) that further distinguish the households where only one parent is immigrants from those where both parents are immigrants. Nguyen et al (2005) report that Hispanic and Black students have experienced an important upward mobility in education because they are far more likely than their parents to graduate from high school, but their educational achievement lies far behind that of whites. Also, there are substantial disparities in educational and occupational mobility across ethnic groups (and gender).…”

“…similar educational achievements of partners) has strongly contributed to shaping occupational mobility is some countries (e.g. Ermisch et al, 2006 for United Kingdom and Germany;and Nguyen et al, 2005 for the United States).…”