Measurement

Studying a dynamic model of intergenerational transmission, we show that past events affect contemporaneous trends in intergenerational mobility. Structural changes may generate long-lasting mobility trends that can be nonmonotonic, and declining mobility may reflect past gains rather than a recent deterioration of equality of opportunity. We provide two applications. We first show that changes in the parent generation have partially offset the effect of rising skill premia on income mobility in the United States. We then show that a Swedish school reform reduced the transmission of inequalities in the directly affected generation but increased their persistence in the next.

We estimate long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for representative samples of the U.S. - born population. Harmonizing all surveys that include father's occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s-1970s birth cohorts. We show that mobility increases between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts and that the decline of Black-white income gaps explains about half of this rise. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly women, considerable overstates the level of mobility for twentieth-century birth cohorts while simultaneously understating its increase between the 1910s and 1940s.

We use linked parent-child administrative data for five countries in North America and Europe, as well as detailed survey data for two more, to investigate methodological challenges in the estimation of absolute income mobility. We show that the commonly used "copula and marginals" approximation methods perform well across countries in our sample, and the greatest challenges to their accuracy stem not from assumptions about relative mobility rates over time but from the use of nonrepresentative marginal income distributions. We also provide a multicountry analysis of sensitivity to specification decisions related to age of income measurement, income concept, family structure, and price index.

By providing confidence sets for ranks, this paper addresses the problem that rankings, for example, of neighborhoods in the US according to intergenerational mobility can be more or less informative.

A glitch with the standard algorithm stimulated a broader question: Is there an inequality measure that both captures how people experience economic disparities and independently of the number of wealth holders, is not downward-biased?

How rich are the richest Americans? A thorough answer to this question is necessary to address public concern over rising inequality, whether the distribution of resources is fair, and how policy ought to respond. This paper uses administrative tax data to estimate top wealth in the United States.

Racial disparities are pervasive in many stages of the criminal justice system, but are often challenging to interpret. This paper shows how the quasi-random assignment of bail judges can be used to isolate release disparities among defendants with identical misconduct potential, a discrimination measure broadly linked to legal theories of disparate impact.

This paper develops algorithms that recover existing national accounts aggregates from naturally occurring transaction data and produce novel measures, such as distributional national accounts for the different components of output.