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Title: Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden Compared to the United States
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Bjorklund, Anders Jantti, Markus |
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Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden Compared to the United States The American Economic Review 87,5 (December 1997): 1009-1018. Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2951338 Cohort(s): Older Men, Young Men Publisher: American Economic Association Keyword(s): Cross-national Analysis; Family Income; Family Studies; Fathers and Sons; Income; Income Dynamics/Shocks; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility; Mobility, Economic; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID); Sweden, Swedish Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Intergenerational income correlations are an important indication of the extent of economic mobility across families. Until recently it has been thought that the correlations between fathers' and sons' incomes were significantly positive, but quite low, indicating that family background was not a primary deterrent to economic success." Recently, Gary Solon (1989, 1992) and David J. Zimmerman (1992) have reconsidered these findings and considerably improved the methodology and data previously used to measure this correlation. They demonstrated that estimates based on annual income and nonrepresentative homogeneous samples understate the correlation between the long-run economic status of fathers and sons. Using more appropriate techniques and data, they both find correlations between 0.4 and 0.5 for the United States. Because Solon used the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Zimmerman the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS), the magnitude of their estimates seems fairly reliable. This paper assesses the magnitude of the same parameter for Sweden. Sweden provides an interesting comparison. In terms of equality of outcome, Sweden and the United States are at two extremes among OECD countries-the United States is at the top and Sweden at the bottom of orderings of inequality of disposable income (Anthony B. Atkinson et al., 1995). Their rank order in international comparisons of earnings inequality (before taxes) is similar (Richard Freeman and Lawrence Katz, 1995). Our interest in a comparison of intergenerational income correlation between Sweden and the United States is motivated, in part, by the question whether the extent of crosssectional and intergenerational inequality are independent of each other. Is it possible that Sweden, which has less cross-sectional income inequality, also has more intergenerational mobility? |
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Bibliography Citation
Bjorklund, Anders and Markus Jantti. "Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden Compared to the United States." The American Economic Review 87,5 (December 1997): 1009-1018.
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