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Research papers on Wealth inequality and mobility

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  1. Socioeconomic Inequalities in Depression: A Meta-Analysis

    Vincent Lorant · 2003 · American Journal of Epidemiology · 2,631 citations

    Low socioeconomic status (SES) is generally associated with high psychiatric morbidity, more disability, and poorer access to health care. Among psychiatric disorders, depression exhibits a more controversial association with SES. The authors carried out a meta-analysis to evaluate the magnitude, shape, and modifiers of such an association. The search found 51 prevalence studies, five incidence studies, and four persistence studies meeting the criteria. A random effects model was applied to the odds ratio of the lowest SES group compared with the highest, and meta-regression was used to assess the dose-response relation and the influence of covariates. Results indicated that low-SES individu

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

    Miles Corak · 2013 · SSRN Electronic Journal · 1,767 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. Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: an Intergenerational Perspective*

    Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, et al. · 2019 · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 814 citations

    Abstract We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989 to 2015. We document three results. First, black Americans and American Indians have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to persistent disparities across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven by differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women. Hispanic Americans have rates of intergenerational mobility more similar to whites than blacks, leading the Hispanic-white

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  4. Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility

    Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, et al. · 2017 · National Bureau of Economic Research · 621 citations

    We characterize intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile. Second, children from low-and high-income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend, indicating that low-income students are not mismatched at selective colleges. Third, rates of upward mobilitythe fraction of students who come f

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  5. Intergenerational Transfers and the Accumulation of Wealth

    William G. Gale, John Karl Scholz · 1994 · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 604 citations

    This paper uses household data to provide direct estimates of intergenerational transfers as a source of wealth. The authors distinguish between intended transfers (for example, gifts to other households) and possibly unintended transfers (bequests) and estimate that intended transfers account for at least 20 percent of net worth. Thus, a significant portion of the U.S. wealth cannot be explained by the life-cycle model, even when the model is augmented to allow for bequests. Estimated bequests can account for an additional 31 percent of net worth. The authors also show that transfers among living people are about half as large as bequests.

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  7. Wealth Inequality in the United States

    Lisa A. Keister, Stephanie Möller · 2000 · Annual Review of Sociology · 484 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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  8. The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects

    Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren · 2016 · National Bureau of Economic Research · 483 citations

    We show that the neighborhoods in which children grow up shape their earnings, college attendance rates, and fertility and marriage patterns by studying more than seven million families who move across commuting zones and counties in the U.S. Exploiting variation in the age of children when families move, we find that neighborhoods have significant childhood exposure effects: the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighborhoodas measured by the outcomes of children already living there -improve linearly in proportion to the amount of time they spend growing up in that area, at a rate of approximately 4% per year of exposure. We distinguish the causal effects of neighborhood

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  9. Intergenerational Inequality: A Sociological Perspective

    Robert S. Erikson, John H. Goldthorpe · 2002 · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 473 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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  10. Wealth Inequality and Accumulation

    Alexandra Killewald, Fabian T. Pfeffer, Jared Schachner · 2017 · Annual Review of Sociology · 459 citations

    Research on wealth inequality and accumulation and the data upon which it relies have expanded substantially in the twenty-first century. While the field has experienced rapid growth, conceptual and methodological challenges remain. We begin by discussing two major unresolved methodological concerns facing wealth research: how to address challenges to causal inference posed by wealth's cumulative nature and how to operationalize net worth, given its highly skewed nature. To underscore the need for continued empirical attention to net worth, we review trends in wealth levels and inequality and evaluate wealth's distinctiveness as an indicator of social stratification. Next, we provide an over

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  11. Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality: The Latin American Case

    Florencia Torche · 2014 · Annual Review of Sociology · 218 citations

    Prompted by new data and a renewed concern about equality of opportunity, the study of intergenerational mobility has flourished in Latin America in the past decade. Although analysis is still restricted to a handful of countries, one conclusion appears clear: Intergenerational income mobility is weaker in Latin America than in industrial countries and is characterized by “persistence at the top,” a pattern consistent with the high levels of economic concentration in the region. However, social class mobility in Latin America does not differ from that in the industrialized world. This essay reviews two generations of mobility research since the 1960s, takes stock of current findings on econo

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  14. Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality

    Fabian T. Pfeffer, Alexandra Killewald · 2019 · Socius : sociological research for a dynamic world · 84 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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  15. How Do Inheritances Shape Wealth Inequality? Theory and Evidence from Sweden

    Arash Nekoei, D. Seim · 2021 · SSRN Electronic Journal · 40 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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  16. 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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  18. The Intergenerational Propagation of Wealth Inequality

    Alan G. Isaac · 2014 · Metroeconomica · 7 citations

    AbstractThis 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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  19. 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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  20. 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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  21. Using machine learning to unveil the predictors of intergenerational mobility

    Luís Clemente‐Casinhas, Alexandra Ferreira‐Lopes, L. Martins · 2024 · Review of Income and Wealth · 3 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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  22. 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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  23. Intergenerational mobility and racial inequality: The case for a more holistic approach

    Janeria A 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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