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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 · 2,616 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

  2. 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 · 803 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

  3. 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 · 617 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

  4. Intergenerational Transfers and the Accumulation of Wealth

    William G. Gale, John Karl Scholz · 1994 · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 605 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.

  6. 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

  7. Wealth Inequality in the United States

    Lisa A. Keister, Stephanie Möller · 2000 · Annual Review of Sociology · 481 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

  8. 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.

  9. Wealth Inequality and Accumulation

    Alexandra Killewald, Fabian T. Pfeffer, Jared Schachner · 2017 · Annual Review of Sociology · 450 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

  10. Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality: The Latin American Case

    Florencia Torche · 2014 · Annual Review of Sociology · 216 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

  13. Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality

    Fabian T. Pfeffer, Alexandra 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

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

    Andrey Pugachev, Anastasia Chistyakova · 2023 · Population · 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

  22. Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility in Sierra Leone

    Giorgia Zotti, Vito Peragine · 2026 · SSRN Electronic Journal

    This paper provides the first comprehensive microdata-based assessment of inequality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility in Sierra Leone. Using the 2003 and 2018 Sierra Leone Integrated Household Surveys and focusing on consumption and education, we combine an ex-ante parametric approach with conditional inference trees, random forests, and Shapley-value decompositions to isolate the share of inequality attributable to predetermined circumstances such as birthplace, parental education and occupation, gender, and religion. The inequality of consumption is high (Gini 0.34), and about 55% of it is explained by circumstances, with birthplace and mothers' occupations emerging as the mai

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