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Previous Webinars​

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Keynote talk on New Approaches to Intergenerational Mobility

8th of December 2021

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Abstract: We propose to capture several notions of intergenerational mobility (IGM) by a distinction between the joint distribution of intergenerational outcomes, and its counterfactual, stochastic independence,  representing complete “mobility”. Our new measures are sufficient statistics for most IGM indices, and capture mobility as movement, dependence and predictability/causality. This is done nonparametrically, subsuming the regression based concepts of (conditional mean) IGM and correlation-based measurements, including rank-rank regressions that are a severely narrow aspect of the underlying copulas, and of “causality”, generally. The distributional aspect is critical, and the proposed entropy measures account for nonlinear and complex forms of immobility at different parts of outcome distributions. Our analysis reveals that the joint distribution of “incomes” is inherently non-normal, and reveal substantial nonlinearity and heterogeneity in dependence between child and parental incomes across the distribution of parental income. We find that general concordance, indicating poverty and affluence traps, is poorly accounted for in regression based IGEs which underestimate overall immobility, even within their limited view of “mobility”. Our distributional measures revise some, and robustify other aspects of the narratives of IGM in the US., generally, and among ethnic and spatial circumstances.

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Chair: Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (Virginia Tech & IIEA Board Member)

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​Speaker: Esfandiar Maasoumi (Emory University)

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This webinar was based on the following papers: Paper 1 and Paper 2.

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