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Research papers on Wealth inequality and mobility

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  1. Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility

    M. Corak · 2013 · SSRN Electronic Journal · 1,819 citations

    Families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child’s opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background. Cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers will most likely lower the degree of intergenerational earnings mobility for the next generation of Americans coming of age in a more polarized labor market, while the substantial rise in the income shares of the top 1 percent, their access to sources of high-quality human capital investment for their children, and the intergenerational transmission of employers and wealth will imply a much higher rate of transmission of economic advantage at the very

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  3. Wealth Inequality in the United States

    Lisa A. Keister, Stephanie Möller · 2000 · Annual Review of Sociology · 477 citations

    Wealth ownership in the United States has long been concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population, yet researchers have paid relatively little attention to the causes and consequences of this inequality. In this essay, we review the literature that does exist on wealth accumulation and distribution. We begin with an examination of the reasons that wealth inequality has received little empirical attention. We then discuss methods of creating empirical estimates of wealth accumulation and distribution, and we present some estimates of recent trends in wealth inequality. We explore a diverse collection of research that explains these trends, covering treatments of aggregate in

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  4. Intergenerational Inequality: A Sociological Perspective

    Robert S. Erikson, John H. Goldthorpe · 2002 · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 470 citations

    When economists are concerned with the inheritance of inequality, they typically focus on the intergenerational transmission of income or wealth. In contrast, sociologists are more likely to analyze intergenerational mobility between (and immobility in) different class positions.

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  7. Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality

    Fabian T. Pfeffer, Alexandra A. Killewald · 2019 · Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 82 citations

    The black-white gap in household wealth is large and well documented. Here, we visualize how this racial wealth gap persists across generations. Animating the flow of individuals between the relative wealth position of parents and their adult children, we show that the disadvantage of black families is a consequence both of wealth inequality in prior generations and race differences in the transmission of wealth positions across generations: Black children both have less wealthy parents on average and are far more likely to be downwardly mobile in household wealth. By displaying intergenerational movements between parental and offspring wealth quintiles, we underline how intergenerational fl

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  8. How Do Inheritances Shape Wealth Inequality? Theory and Evidence from Sweden

    Arash Nekoei, D. Seim · 2021 · SSRN Electronic Journal · 44 citations

    A recent literature has found that inheritances reduce relative measures of wealth inequality. Theoretically, we show that this surprising finding stems from high intergenerational wealth mobility or low inheritance inequality. Empirically, we show that this finding is only true in the short run using Swedish administrative data and exploiting randomness in the timing of death. The inheritance effect on wealth inequality is reversed within a decade due to less wealthy heirs depleting their inherited wealth in contrast to more affluent heirs. Investigating mechanisms behind this depletion, we find that inheritances generate a roughly constant increase in annual non-labor income. 60% of this i

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  9. Intergenerational Economic Mobility and the Racial Wealth Gap

    C. Robertson, J. Toney · 2021 · AEA Papers and Proceedings · 21 citations

    A growing body of research documents the importance of wealth and the racial wealth gap in perpetuating inequality across generations. We examine the impact of wealth on child income. Our two-stage least squares regressions reveal that grandparental wealth has an important effect on the younger generation's stock, which in turn affects the younger generation's household income. We further explore the relationship between income and wealth by decomposing the child's income by race. We find that the intergroup disparity in income is mainly attributable to differences in family background. These findings indicate that wealth is an important source of income inequality.

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  10. The Intergenerational Propagation of Wealth Inequality

    Alan G. Isaac · 2014 · Metroeconomica · 7 citations

    This paper highlights the crucial role of demographic assumptions in models of the intergenerational transmission of wealth inequality. Specifically, we show that Alan Blinder's surprising predictions that bequest and mating practices can sustain but cannot cause wealth inequality are extremely fragile. We show that these predictions depend on a common and apparently minor demographic assumption: fixed sex ratios in family composition. We implement the Blinder model as an agent‐based simulation and show that without this demographic assumption such familial institutions are causative for wealth inequality, even in the long run.

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  12. Rising inequality is not balanced by intergenerational mobility

    Jason Beckfield · 2019 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 5 citations

    The United States currently exhibits more economic inequality than any peer nation, and surveys of US adults support the idea that inequality is acceptable if it is balanced by mobility. Many are untroubled if doctors make 10 or 20 times what janitors make, as long as janitors’ sons have opportunities to become doctors. In an era of rising income and wealth inequality in the United States since the 1970s, that balance of inequality and mobility grows in salience. Enter Song et al.’s paper, “Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s” (1), which uses linked household and population records on the occupations of generations of US-born white men, along

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  13. The association between childhood exposure to local wealth inequality and intergenerational income mobility in the United States

    Manuel Schechtl · 2025 · Nature Communications · 4 citations

    Previous research has documented that income inequality is negatively associated with intergenerational income mobility. Beyond income, wealth is also distributed unequally. However, a lack of comprehensive wealth data has meant that the link between wealth inequality and upward mobility in income remains unclear. This study examines this association using a recently published database of local wealth inequality estimates (GEOWEALTH-US) as well as upward mobility estimates published by Opportunity Insights. Results from linear models estimated by OLS reveal a negative association between childhood exposure to local wealth inequality at the commuting zone level (N = 724) and mobility outcomes

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  14. Using machine learning to unveil the predictors of intergenerational mobility

    Luís Clemente‐Casinhas, Alexandra Ferreira-Lopes, L. Martins · 2024 · Review of Income and Wealth · 4 citations

    We assess the predictors of intergenerational mobility in income and education for a sample of 137 countries, between 1960 and 2018, using the World Bank's Global Database on Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM). The Rigorous LASSO and the Random Forest and Gradient Boosting algorithms are considered, to avoid the consequences of an ad‐hoc model selection in our high dimensionality context. We obtain variable importance plots and analyze the relationships between mobility and its predictors through Shapley values. Results show that intergenerational income mobility is expected to be positively predicted by the parental average education, the share of married individuals and negatively predicted

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  15. Parental homeownership and education: the implications for offspring wealth inequality in Great Britain

    Paul Gregg, Ricky Kanabar · 2023 · Journal of Social Policy · 3 citations

    The rapid widening of wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding whether and separately the rate at which individuals accumulate particular types of wealth by family background is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show offspring wealth inequality is driven by housing wealth, and holding such wealth is becoming increasingly associated with early life circumstances relating to parental housing tenure and education, even after controlling for adult offspring’s own characteristics. Importantly, we find adult offspring whose parents hold a degree and are homeowners are no less likely to report homeownership and housi

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  16. Intergenerational mobility and racial inequality: The case for a more holistic approach

    Janeria Easley, Regina S. Baker · 2023 · Sociology Compass · 2 citations

    Intergenerational social mobility studies have largely explored the relationship between one aspect of parent background (e.g., education, income, occupational status, wealth, or neighborhood context) and the corresponding aspect of that parent's child once they reach adulthood. Studies examining these various measures have provided differing conclusions about the extent that social origins constrain attainment in the U.S. In contrast, the persistence of racial inequality in intergenerational mobility is one consistent finding. For instance, across various measures, research demonstrates Black individuals are more likely than White individuals to experience downward mobility, and less likely

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  17. Wealth Inequality and Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States

    Manuel Schechtl · 2024 · 2 citations

    Where income inequality is higher, intergenerational mobility in income is lower. Income inequality affects upward mobility because exposure to socioeconomic disparities during childhood influences economic opportunities. Beyond income, wealth is also distributed unequally and can facilitate the hoarding of opportunities. Therefore, this study inves- tigates whether wealth inequality is negatively associated with intergenerational income mobility. To examine the impact of childhood exposure to wealth inequality on upward mobility in income, this study utilizes a unique, novel database that makes local estimates of wealth inequality across the United States publicly available. Results from li

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  18. Wealth inequality and intergenerational mobility in Russia: possibilities of tax regulation

    Andrey A. Pugachev, Anastasia Alekseevna Chistyakova · 2023 · Народонаселение · 1 citations

    The economic inequality of people in Russia today is high. The decline in intergenerational mobility is determined by increasing concentration of capital. The purpose of the study is to examine the capabilities of taxes in smoothing the wealth inequality of Russians and strengthening the intergenerational mobility in the framework of assessing their relationship on the basis of the World Bank database. According to the results of the analysis, there was a decrease in the mobility between generations in Russia and emergence of the problem of consolidating the economic situation within family, which, if the present trends continue, will be intensifying. For generations born in the 1970s and 19

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  23. Changing Opportunity: Rising Local Wealth Inequality and Growing Class Gaps in Income Mobility

    Manuel Schechtl, F. Torche · 2026 · Sociological Science

    : Recent research documents widening class gaps in intergenerational income mobility in the United States. Children from low-income families in more recent cohorts attain lower incomes than their counterparts in earlier cohorts, while no comparable decline is observed among children from high-income families. This study examines whether rising local wealth inequality contributes to this growing class divide in mobility. To do so, it combines newly published estimates of local wealth inequality from GEOWEALTH-US with cohort-based measures of upward mobility from Opportunity Insights. First-difference models reveal a consistent negative association between rising local wealth inequality and de

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  24. Parental Wealth & Social Mobility: The Impact of Wealth Inequality and the State on Intergenerational Income Mobility

    Joshua Sowah · 2016 · Lund University Publications Student Papers (Lund University)

    Equality of opportunity is a notion rooted in many societies as a conception of importance. The idea that one’s life chances ought to be unrelated to the aspects of one’s background upon which one has no say, such as the material wealth of one’s parents, is generally one that is widely held. The term ‘Intergenerational income mobility’, describing, as it does, the interrelatedness of the incomes of parents with those of their children, is thus too a conception of some importance. Recent studies, looking at cross-sectional income inequality across a range of – primarily advanced – nations, have established a link between income inequality and intergenerational income mobility, suggesting that

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