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A person’s family of origin has a profound impact on his or her life; a student’s performance at university and their interpersonal skills are also influenced by the characteristics of their family. In order to explore how social capital and intergenerational mobility impact university students’ quality of interpersonal communication and experiences, whether there is a “Matthew effect” at the higher education level, how the external social capital and the parenting style within a family affect the comprehensive quality of university students separately, and how university students’ family characteristics impact their quality of interpersonal communication, which will in turn affect their performance at university, this paper starts from the perspective of social capital and intergenerational mobility, and uses the cross-sectional data of the China Family Tracking Survey (CFPS) from 2018 to conduct Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin analysis and logistic binary regression for 1037 university students nationwide, to check whether the selected variables can be subjected to principal component analysis. The results show that, on one hand, university students’ family characteristics have a significant positive impact on their quality of interpersonal communication; on the other hand, their family backgrounds also have significant impact on their academic performance and enthusiasm for participating in student unions, as well as part-time employment and internships. In addition, according to the results of the mediation test, interpersonal communication skills play a mediating role in the way that family characteristics impact students’ performance at university, including their participation in student organizations, as well as internships and part-time jobs. Finally, this paper, by referring to both theoretical and empirical analysis, presents relevant suggestions from the perspectives of the individual, family, and government, aiming to facilitate the sustainable development of university students.

The Allocation of Expenditures and Time over Time In the year 2018, the average high skilled single male worked more than 35 hours per week in the market and allocated more than 70 percent of expenditures to services. In the same year, the average low skilled female worked 22 hours per week in the market and allocated around 65 percent of expenditures to services. What might explain these differences at that point in time, and how they have developed over time? In this paper, I compile and analyze data related to time-use and the allocation of expenditures. The dataset that I compile is customized to fit the needs of my companion paper, Home Production, Expenditures, and Time Use, in which I propose and test a theory that includes home production. Home Production, Expenditures, and Time Use I propose a unified analysis of expenditures and time use, via a model in which households can produce services at home. I show that the model, which uses stable homothetic preferences and standard functional forms for home production, can match data for the U.S. about expenditures and time-use, both in the cross-section and the developments over time. For women, changes in social norms were important. Absent changes in social norms, the developments would have been vastly different, both in terms of how they allocated their time and in terms of how expenditures were allocated. It Runs in the Family: Occupational Choice and the Allocation of Talent Children frequently grow up to work in the same jobs as their parents. Using unique data on worker skills and personality traits, and administrative data on the labor market outcomes of Swedish men, we study how skills and parental background influence occupational choice, intergenerational mobility, and the allocation of talent in the economy. First, we document that sons are disproportionately more likely to follow into the same occupation as their fathers, across all skills and earnings levels. Second, we estimate a general equilibrium Roy model with costly occupational choice and heterogeneous entry barriers depending on parental background. We find that these entry barriers lead to misallocation: Equalizing entry costs across workers leads occupational following to fall by half. This leads to increased intergenerational mobility, with the largest income gains among sons of fathers in the bottom income decile. Third, exploiting structural change in employment in fathers' occupations, difference-in-differences estimates imply that occupational following leads to reduced earnings, concentrated among sons of low-income fathers and those whose skills are misaligned with those of incumbents in their father’s occupation. Our findings suggest that equalizing career opportunities bring equity gains. Monetary Policy and Liquidity Constraints: Evidence from the Euro Area We quantify the relationship between the response of output to monetary policy shocks and the share of liquidity constrained households. We do so in the context of the euro area, using a Local Projections Instrumental Variables estimation. We construct an instrument for changes in interest rates from changes in overnight indexed swap rates in a narrow time window around ECB announcements. Monetary policy shocks have heterogeneous effects on output across countries. Using micro data, we show that the elasticity of output to monetary policy shocks is larger in countries that have a larger fraction of households that are liquidity constrained.

This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more skilled students increasingly enrolled in college and ended up with more skilled partners and more skilled children. Exploiting college expansions, we find that better college access increases both skill sorting in couples and skill and earnings inequality among their children. All findings support the notion that rising earnings inequality is, at least in part, supply driven by rising skill inequality.

This paper makes use of the Markov Switching model and the K-Means Cluster analysis to estimate the transition probabilities of social mobility and to analyze the impact of social inequalities on intergenerational social mobility. The dataset is a sample of 44 countries and comprises the 2018 social mobility indices, and the 2018 or latest income inequality measures. The data are collected from the OECD Income and Wealth Distribution Databases, and from the world economic forum. It was found that the likelihood of moving upward or downward the social ladder is minimal in both developed and emerging countries. In addition, the paper found that the hypothesis according to which high-income countries have a higher relative social mobility is not necessarily true. The United States, a high-income country, was found to have a lower social mobility, similar to that of Turkey and South Africa. Furthermore, it was found that when poverty decreases, intergenerational social mobility increases in both lower and higher mobility countries. Policies that promote equality of opportunities at all stages of life are therefore recommended to improve intergenerational social mobility.

This paper estimates intergenerational mobility in education using data from 91 censuses that span 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean over half a century. It measures upward mobility as the likelihood of obtaining at least a primary education for individuals whose parents did not finish primary school, whereas downward mobility is the likelihood of failing to complete primary education for individuals whose parents completed at least primary school. In addition, the paper explores the geography of educational intergenerational mobility using nearly 400 “provinces” and more than 6,000 “districts”. It documents wide cross-country and within-country heterogeneity. The paper documents a declining trend in the mobility gap between urban and rural populations, and small differences by gender. Within countries, the level of mobility is highly correlated with the share of primary completion of the previous generation, which suggests a high level of inertia. In addition, upward (downward) mobility is negatively (positively) correlated with distance to the capital and the share of employment in agriculture, but positively (negatively) correlated with the share of employment in industry.

Various scholars have estimated levels of intergenerational mobility in OECD countries. Fewer estimates are available for developing countries, where mobility arguably matters more due to starker differences in living standards. This paper presents new estimates of mobility for a developing country, namely Indonesia. The estimates are based on data from five waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey, a longitudinal analysis of socio-economic status which began in 1993. We constructed a pooling sample consisting of 9,445 matching pairs of children and their parents. The paper estimates relative mobility using the intergenerational elasticity of income. We find that although, overall, the intergenerational elasticity of income is low compared with other developing countries, the level of mobility in Indonesia differs markedly by children's gender and across provinces and generations.

This paper presents credible and comparable evidence on intergenerational educational mobility in 53 developing countries using sibling correlation as a measure, and data from 230 waves of Demographic and Health Surveys. It is the first paper to provide estimates of sibling correlation in schooling for a large number of developing countries using high quality standardized data. Sibling correlation is an omnibus measure of mobility as it captures observed and unobserved family and neighborhood factors shared by siblings when growing up together. The estimates suggest that sibling correlation in schooling in developing countries is much higher (average 0.59) than that in developed countries (average 0.41). There is substantial spatial heterogeneity across regions, with Latin America and Caribbean having the highest (0.65) and Europe and Central Asia the lowest (0.48) estimates. Country level heterogeneity within a region is more pronounced. The evolution of sibling correlation suggests a variety of mobility experiences, with some regions registering a monotonically declining trend from the 1970s birth cohort to the 1990s birth cohort (Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and Pacific), while others remained trapped in stagnancy (South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa). The only region that experienced monotonically increasing sibling correlation is the Middle East and North Africa. The recent approach of Bingley and Cappellari (2019) is used to estimate the share of sibling correlation due to intergenerational transmission. The estimates show that when the homogeneity and independence assumptions implicit in the standard model of intergenerational transmission are relaxed, the estimated share is much larger. In the sample of countries, on average 74 percent of sibling correlation can be attributed to intergenerational transmission, while there are some countries where the share is more than 80 percent (most in Sub-Saharan Africa). This suggests a dominant role for parents in determining the educational opportunities of their children. Evidence on the evolution of the intergenerational share, however, suggests a declining importance of the intergenerational transmission component in many countries, but the pattern is diverse. In some cases, the trend in the intergenerational share is opposite to the trend in sibling correlation.

This paper examines the short-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for inequality in developing countries. The analysis takes advantage of high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank to assess the distributional impacts of the pandemic through the channels of job and income losses, food insecurity, and children’s education in the early days of the pandemic and subsequent period of economic recovery leading up to early 2021. It also introduces a methodology for estimating changes in income inequality due to the pandemic by combining data from phone surveys, pre-pandemic household surveys, and macroeconomic projections of sectoral growth rates. The paper finds that the pandemic had dis-equalizing impacts both across and within countries. Even under the assumption of distribution-neutral impacts within countries, the projected income losses are estimated to be higher in the bottom half of the global income distribution. Within countries, disadvantaged groups were more likely to have experienced work and income losses initially and are recovering more slowly. Inequality simulations suggest an increase in the Gini index for 29 of 34 countries in the sample, with an average increase of about 1 percent. Although these short-term impacts on inequality appear to be small, they suggest that projections of global poverty and inequality impacts of COVID-19 under the assumption of distribution-neutral changes within countries are likely to underestimate actual impacts. Finally, the paper argues that the overall inequality impacts of COVID-19 could be larger over the medium-to-long term on account of a slow and uneven recovery in many developing countries, and disparities in learning losses during pandemic-related school closures, which will likely have long-lasting effects on inequality of opportunity and social mobility.

Σε αντίθεση με συμβατικές προσεγγίσεις, στο άρθρο αυτό διερευνάται η αναπαραγωγή της ανισότητας, εστιάζοντας στην επίδραση του κοινωνικού κράτους στην κοινωνική κινητικότητα από διαγενεακή σκοπιά. Αξιοποιώντας εναλλακτικές τεχνικές αναλύουμε δεδομένα της EU-SILC για να εξετάσουμε τη συσχέτιση των κοινωνικοοικονομικών επιτευγμάτων μεταξύ γονέων και παιδιών. Η ανάλυση αναδεικνύει τη σημασία του κοινωνικού κράτους για τις εκβάσεις διαγενεακής κοινωνικής κινητικότητας στις χώρες της Ευρώπης., Contrary to conventional perspectives, we investigate in this paper the reproduction of inequality, focusing on the welfare state effect on social mobility from an intergenerational point of view. Utilizing alternative techniques we analyze EU-SILC data to examine the correlation of socioeconomic attainments between parents and children. The analysis highlights the significance of the welfare state for intergenerational social mobility outcomes in European countries.

Career decisions, that is educational and occupational choice, are not only made by comparing expected incomes, but also by considering non-monetary rewards like social impact, chances of promotion, or the compatibility of work and family. In this paper, I use rich panel data from Germany to show that preferences about such aspects of a career as stated at age 17 are strong predictors of future earnings in the labor market. At the same time, these preferences differ significantly by socio-economic background, and intergenerational income persistence is reduced by 8-22 percent when accounting for career preferences.

In the past 50 years, almost one million U.S. students have been present on school grounds during a shooting. This paper examines the long-term and intergenerational effects of school shootings on earnings, educational attainment, and mobility. I find that exposure to a school shooting decreases survivors’ hourly wage by 20:8% and these effects persist over their lifetime. Furthermore, I show that the effect of school shootings lasts even beyond the initially treated and has detrimental effects on their children. I find that having shooting-exposed parents decreases children’s hourly wage by 18:8%.

In the past 50 years, almost one million U.S. students have been present on school grounds during a shooting. This paper examines the long-term and intergenerational effects of school shootings on earnings, educational attainment, and mobility. I find that exposure to a school shooting decreases survivors’ hourly wage by 20:8% and these effects persist over their lifetime. Furthermore, I show that the effect of school shootings lasts even beyond the initially treated and has detrimental effects on their children. I find that having shooting-exposed parents decreases children’s hourly wage by 18:8%.

In the past 50 years, almost one million U.S. students have been present on school grounds during a shooting. This paper examines the long-term and intergenerational effects of school shootings on earnings, educational attainment, and mobility. I find that exposure to a school shooting decreases survivors’ hourly wage by 20:8% and these effects persist over their lifetime. Furthermore, I show that the effect of school shootings lasts even beyond the initially treated and has detrimental effects on their children. I find that having shooting-exposed parents decreases children’s hourly wage by 18:8%.

This paper decomposes inequality in subjective well-being into inequality due to socioeconomic background (SEB) and meritocratic inequality due to differences in individual merits such as school performance. We measure the meritocratic share of well-being, defined as the share of explained variation in life satisfaction attributable to variation in merits not related to SEB. The empirical evidence from Denmark combines survey information on well-being with administrative data on individual characteristics. We find systematic differences in wellbeing already in early adulthood, where differences in economic outcomes are not yet visible. At age 18-19, about 40 percent of the inequality in well-being is meritocratic. The role of merits rises to 65-85 percent in midlife (age 40-55), where it is also higher than the role of merits in income inequality. The positive conclusions that inequality in well-being is more meritocratic than income inequality and more meritocratic as people grow older get support by corresponding results using an equal opportunity approach.

Transfers from parents—either in the form of gifts or inheritances—have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses a 19-year panel of administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows available to an individual (defined as the capitalized sum of net labor income, government transfers, and gifts and inheritances received over the period) accounted for by capitalized gifts and inheritances. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that gifts and inheritances represent a small share of Total Inflows; this is true across the distribution of Total Inflows, as well as at all levels of net wealth at a point in time. Gifts and inheritances are only an important source of income flows among those who have very wealthy parents. Additionally, gifts and inheritances have very little effect on the distribution of Total Inflows – when we do a counterfactual Total Inflows distribution with zero gifts and inheritances, it is not much different from the actual distribution. Our findings suggest that inheritance taxes may do little to mitigate the extreme wealth inequality in society. Research Council of Norway NORFACE DIAL

This paper studies intergenerational mobility—the transmission of family influence. We develop and estimate measures of lifetime resources (income and wealth) motivated by economic theory that account for generational differences in life-cycle trajectories, uncertainty, and credit constraints. These measures of lifetime resources allow us to estimate the transmission of welfare and lifetime resources at different stages of the life cycle. We compare these measures with traditional ones such as wage income and disposable income measured over narrow windows of age that are used to proxy lifetime wealth. The performance of proxy measures is poor. Parents' expected lifetime resources are stronger predictors of many important child outcomes (including children's own expected lifetime resources and education) than the income measures traditionally used in the literature on social mobility. Changes in patterns of educational attainment across generations explain most of the intergenerational change in life-cycle dynamics. While relative mobility is overstated by the traditional income measures, absolute upward mobility is understated. Recent generations have higher welfare and are better off compared to their parents.

This paper decomposes inequality in subjective well-being into inequality due to socioeconomic background (SEB) and meritocratic inequality due to differences in individual merits such as school performance. We measure the meritocratic share of well-being, defined as the share of explained variation in life satisfaction attributable to variation in merits not related to SEB. The empirical evidence from Denmark combines survey information on well-being with administrative data on individual characteristics. We find systematic differences in well-being already in early adulthood, where differences in economic outcomes are not yet visible. At age 18–19, about 40 percent of the inequality in well-being is meritocratic. The role of merits rises to 65–85 percent in midlife (age 40–55), where it is also higher than the role of merits in income inequality. The positive conclusions that inequality in well-being is more meritocratic than income inequality and more meritocratic as people grow older get support by corresponding results using an equal opportunity approach.

To study the effects of neighborhood and place-based interventions, this paper incorporates neighborhood effects into a general equilibrium (GE) heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model with endogenous location choice and child skill development. Importantly, housing costs, as well as neighborhood effects, are endogenously determined in equilibrium. Having calibrated the model using U.S. data, we use simulations to show that predictions from the model match reduced form evidence from experimental and quasi-experimental studies of housing mobility and urban development programs. After this validation exercise, we study the long-run and large-scale impacts of vouchers and place-based subsidies. Both policies result in welfare gains by reducing inequality and generating improvements in average skills and productivity, all of which offset higher levels of taxes and other GE effects. We find that a voucher program generates larger long-run welfare gains relative to place-based policies. Our analysis of transition dynamics, however, suggests there may be more political support for place-based policies.

While there is extensive literature examining the growth and development effects of foreign aid, very little attention has been paid to its potential impact on social mobility. Thus, this paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effect of foreign aid on intergenerational educational mobility in Africa. Drawing on a sample of 28 countries over the period 1970-2010 and using the popular and wellknown probit estimator, we find strong evidence that foreign aid raises the likelihood of experiencing upward educational mobility in the region, while the probability of downward educational mobility tends to be lower in countries that receive a high level of foreign aid. These effects mainly operate through the increased financing for education, the improved education system, and policy, as well as improved education conditions. More interestingly, focusing on the sectoral decomposition of total aid receivedi.e., education sector versus the rest of the economy-, the study highlights that foreign aid to the education sector tends to increase the likelihood of upward educational mobility, contrary to aid allocated to the rest of the economy. Our finding suggests that foreign aid has contributed to improving social mobility in African countries.