Search Results
Title: Intergenerational Mobility, Inequality and Government Investment in the United States
Resulting in 1 citation.
| 1. |
Nam, Jaehyun |
|
Intergenerational Mobility, Inequality and Government Investment in the United States Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Social Work, Columbia University, 2017 Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY79 Young Adult Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Family Income; Geocoded Data; Income Level; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility, Economic; State-Level Data/Policy Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Given the widely-accepted finding that countries with greater income inequality also experience less income mobility across generations (Corak, 2013; Krueger, 2012), it is expected that American mobility has decreased with rising income inequality in recent decades (Aaronson & Mazumder, 2008; Corak, 2013; Mazumder, 2012). However, mobility has remained unchanged (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, & Turner, 2014), and is unresponsive to changes in income inequality (Bloome, 2015). These findings raise questions as to why intergenerational income mobility in the U.S. has not fallen during the periods when income inequality has sharply risen. To address these questions, the dissertation focuses on two aims. The first aim is to examine the association between intergenerational income mobility and income inequality in the United States. The second aim is to examine intergenerational income mobility with respect to income inequality and government spending. The main data for this dissertation come from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). The basic sample includes 4,824 parents-children pairs. I aggregate the state-level data from several different resources such as the IRS's Statistics of Income, U.S. Census of Governments, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state-level sample includes 220 state-year observations. Overall, the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) of income is about 0.43, and the analysis indicates that the US in reality is highly immobile, especially when looking at the extreme income groups of the bottom and the top. This study finds that rising income inequality acts to strengthen the importance of parental family income to child's income. Particularly, the evidence that higher income inequality decreases intergenerational income mobility is clearer when migration problems are addressed. |
|
|
Bibliography Citation
Nam, Jaehyun. Intergenerational Mobility, Inequality and Government Investment in the United States. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Social Work, Columbia University, 2017. |