Working Paper
Smoothing or strengthening the ‘Great Gatsby curve’?
We examine the heterogeneous and dynamic impact of China’s New Rural Pension Scheme on intergenerational wealth dependence using a nationally representative longitudinal household survey covering the period 2011–13. We adopt an instrumental quantile...
Policy Brief
Inequality in India on the rise
Following the introduction of economic reforms in the early 1990s, India today is achieving unprecedented per capita growth rates. Poverty reduction has also accelerated and is justly celebrated. There is great concern, however, that this growth is...
Working Paper
Inequality and the generational economy
Differences in the economic lifecycle between countries at different levels of development suggest that there may be differences between sub-populations within countries, particularly where the sub-populations have different levels of income. Given...
Working Paper
Intergenerational mobility, human capital accumulation, and growth in India
Productivity and socio-economic progress are inter-connected. Economic growth funds policies that promote socio-economic progress, while the latter serves as a growth engine. A society with high mobility is one where individual achievements are...
Working Paper
Inequality trends and dynamics in India
India today is achieving per capita growth rates that are historically unprecedented. Poverty reduction has also accelerated. There is concern, however, that this growth is being accompanied by rising inequality. We report on a research project that...
Working Paper
Whose intergenerational mobility?
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...
Journal Article
Multigenerational mobility among males in India
Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational mobility...
Working Paper
Dynastic measures of inter-generational mobility with empirical evidence from Indonesia
We suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes (continuous outcomes such as potential earnings, or discrete ones such as education groups) and captures dynastic...
Working Paper
Intergenerational mobility in occupational choices
Historically, the issue of intergenerational evolution of income, wealth, and socioeconomic status has been the subject of considerable research in the analysis of inequality. Such intergenerational linkages are anticipated to come from two sources...
Working Paper
Multigenerational mobility in India
Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—that is, status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational...
Working Paper
Is there a gender bias in intergenerational mobility?
We examine the intergenerational mobility of women relative to men, using paired mother-daughter and father-son data on occupation and education for Cameroon. We find that both in occupation and education, intergenerational mobility is higher for...
Working Paper
Inequality of opportunity and intergenerational persistence in Latin America
How strong is the transmission of socio-economic status across generations in Latin America? To answer this question, we first review the empirical literature on intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity for the region, summarizing...
Working Paper
Foreign aid and intergenerational mobility in Africa
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 effects of...
Working Paper
Measuring social mobility rates in earlier and less-documented societies
In societies where surnames are inherited from parents, we can use these names to estimate rates of intergenerational mobility. This paper explains how to make such estimates, and illustrates their use in pre-industrial England and modern Chile and...