Intergenerational Mobility in the United States: What We Have Learned from the PSID

Abstract

This article reviews the contributions of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to the study of intergenerational mobility. The PSID enables researchers to track individuals as they form new households and covers many dimensions of socioeconomic status over large portions of the life cycle, making the data ideal for studying intergenerational mobility. Studies have used PSID data to show that the United States is among the least economically mobile countries among advanced economies. The PSID has been instrumental to understanding various dimensions of intergenerational mobility, including occupation; wealth; education; consumption; health; and group differences by gender, race, and region. Studies using the PSID have also cast light on the mechanisms behind intergenerational persistence.

Intergenerational Mobility in Lifetime Income

“…We estimate the intergenerational elasticity of family income, for recent cohorts, at about 0.55, consistent with the higher values advocated by Mazumder (2016Mazumder ( , 2018 and Mitnik et al (2017), and find multiple indications that absolute and relative intergenerational income mobility have declined moderately over this period. With regard to positional mobility, interquartile transitional matrices reveal that the ends of the distribution-the highest and lowest quartiles-are "stickier" than the middle, as earlier studies have found.…”

The Longitudinal Revolution: Sociological Research at the 50-Year Milestone of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics

“…Intergenerational mobility. Sociologists rightfully claim a productive and long-standing line of research on intergenerational social mobility and intergenerational influences that precedes other fields, including economics (Torche 2015;Mazumder 2018). However, after a replication of the classical status attainment model (Blau and Duncan 1967) by Corcoran (1980), PSID-based contributions were largely absent from the burgeoning literature on social class mobility of the 1980s (Ganzeboom, Treiman, and Ultee 1991).…”

“Freedom to Breathe”: Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) to Investigate Air Pollution Inequities in Richmond, CA

“…Insidious constellations of inequity make it appear as though individuals, not systems of socio-historical violence, are at fault [ 29 ]. Culturally structured white supremacy, coded with alleged racial identifiers and thus transgenerational, shifted to wealth passed on in such forms as company ownership, stocks and estate inheritance [ 30 , 31 ], as well as status, privilege and opportunity access, themselves passed on transgenerationally [ 32 , 33 ]. Neoliberalism accelerated wealth accumulation and eroded social services [ 34 ], while fossil fuels accelerated neoliberalism, and air pollution, on a global scale.…”