Economic mobility

We measure college graduate quality—the average human capital of a college’s graduates—for graduates from 2,800 colleges in 48 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50% more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences: emigrants from poorer countries are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college’s students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives both within and across countries.

Generous maternity leave, affordable daycare, extensive social safety nets, excellent universal health care, and high-quality public schools, are all notable features of Nordic countries. There is a widespread belief that such strong public investments in children contribute to a levelled playing field and promote social mobility. However, gaps in learning outcomes between children of rich and poor parents remain as high in Nordic countries as elsewhere in Europe. One explanation for this paradox is that the equalizing impacts of public investments are undone by parental investments in children of rich and poor families, which are as unequal in Nordic countries as in the rest of the European continent.

This study builds a unified non-parametric approach to predicting the unequal effects of trade shocks through both channels based on detailed microdata on spending and employment from the United States.

This study assesses who would lose and who would gain from stricter immigration policies across different local labor markets, taking into account changes in wages, housing prices and internal migration responses.

The authors ask how membership in exclusive social groups affects access to top positions in the economy and society and, if so, who can join.

This paper studies the intergenerational mobility of the children of immigrants over 130 years of US history and answers two related questions: (1) Are children of immigrants more likely to move up in the economic ladder than children of natives from similar economic backgrounds? (2) Are children of contemporary immigrants more or less likely to move up in the economic ladder than children of immigrants from 100 years ago?

Addressing the problem of how to close the gap in university participation between rich and poor students, this paper shows that providing correct information about their university admission chances when introducing preferential admissions can lead to a pool of college entrants that is better-prepared.

The authors examine the effects of the Top Ten Percent policy, which guaranteed students in the top ten percent of their high school graduating class admission to Texas Public Universities, identifying the effects on the students who were newly admitted as a result of the policy change as well as the effects on those students who were pushed out as a result of the policy.‍

If disadvantaged groups move to better neighborhoods at scale, does this affect opportunity in those neighborhoods for future generations? This paper answers this question by studying the largest natural experiment in moving to opportunity in US history: the Great Migration – when 6 million southern African Americans migrated North between 1916 and 1970 to escape racial prejudice and a lack of economic opportunity in the US South.

Recent empirical work documents significant long-run wealth-rank correlations. This is a puzzle, in that the standard macro models of wealth dynamics generate a realistic wealth distribution but cannot capture these patterns. This paper identifies identifying a parsimonious extension of the standard model of wealth dynamics to account for these novel facts on the long-run persistence of wealth-ranks as well as for the observed moments of the wealth distribution.

Can transport infrastructure promote long-term labor market opportunities and sever the occupational tie between parents and their children? Transport infrastructure arguably improves individuals’ economic opportunities by connecting them to employment possibilities that are farther away, and by creating better options locally.‍

This research estimates the effect of breastfeeding on child development: cognitive and socio-emotional, as well as health. Breastfeeding is just one of many ways in which mothers can influence their child’s development, and mothers who breastfeed may also be more or less likely to make other investments that affect their child’s development.

This paper is about an understudied, yet important, aspect of social mobility – absolute mobility, which measures the share of children with higher incomes compared to their parents around the same age.

Over the last decade, socio-economic mobility has declined and the shares in employment of low- and high-paying occupations has increased. This work investigates if job polarization has been a cause of the decline in mobility in the UK.

Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the heterogeneous impact of school closures during the corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. In the model, public investment through schooling is combined with parental time and resource investments in the production of child human capital at different stages in the children’s development process. We quantitatively characterise the long-term consequences from a COVID-19-induced loss of schooling, and find average losses in the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of the affected children of ⁠, as well as welfare losses equivalent to about of permanent consumption. Because of self-productivity in the human capital production function, younger children are hurt more by the school closures than older children. The negative impact of the crisis on children’s welfare is especially severe for those with parents with low educational attainment and low assets.

We examine intergenerational mobility in the very long run, across generations that are six centuries apart. We exploit a unique dataset containing detailed information at the individual level for all people living in the Italian city of Florence in 1427. These individuals have been associated, using their surnames, with their pseudo-descendants living in Florence in 2011. We find that long-run earnings elasticity is about 0.04; we also find an even stronger role for real wealth inheritance and evidence of persistence in belonging to certain elite occupations. Our results are confirmed when we account for the quality of the pseudo-links and when we address the potential selectivity bias behind the matching process. Finally, we frame our results within the existing evidence and argue that the quasi-immobility of preindustrial society and the existence of multigenerational effects might explain the long-lasting effects of ancestors’ socioeconomic status.