Authors
Miles Corak, Matthew J Lindquist, Bhashkar Mazumder
Publication date
2014/10/1
Journal
Labour Economics
Volume
30
Pages
185-200
Publisher
North-Holland
Description
We use new estimators of directional rank mobility developed by Bhattacharya and Mazumder (2011) to compare rates of upward and downward intergenerational mobility across three countries: Canada, Sweden and the United States. These measures overcome some of the limitations of traditional measures of intergenerational mobility such as the intergenerational elasticity, which are not well suited for analyzing directional movements or for examining differences in mobility across the income distribution. Data for each country include highly comparable, administrative data sources containing sufficiently long time spans of earnings. Our most basic measures of directional mobility, which simply compare whether sons moved up or down in the earnings distribution relative to their fathers, do not differ much across the countries. However, we do find that there are clear differences in the extent of the movement. We …
Scholar articles
M Corak, MJ Lindquist, B Mazumder - Labour Economics, 2014