Like Mother, Like Daughter? An Economic Comparison of Immigrant Mothers and Their Daughters

where Y is the logarithm of some measure of the child’s economic well-being, X is the logarithm of a similar measure of the parent’s economic well-being, and the estimated parameter β is the elasticity of the child’s economic well-being with respect to the parent’s well-being. A value of β close to 0 indicates complete intergenerational mobility; a value close to 1 indicates no mobility. Economic well-being is usually measured by income, either for a single year or averaged over 3–5 years, with elasticity estimates ranging from 0.2 to 0.6 (for example, Solon, 1992; Zimmerman, 1992; and Mazumder, 2003). Charles and Hurst (2003) used net worth data and estimated an elasticity of 0.4. Corak (2006) gives a literature review and comparable elasticities for several different countries. One weakness of intergenerational studies is that they have traditionally focused on fathers and sons. Chadwick and Solon (2002) and Aydemir, Chen, and Corak (2009) are evidently the only studies of this type that consider daughters and the former is the only study that looks at family income, rather than an individual’s income. Family income is arguably the more relevant measure since one important aspect of economic mobility is the extent to which people marry people from different backgrounds.