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A New Look at Intergenerational Mobility in G ermany Compared to the U . S
Author(s) -
Schnitzlein Daniel D.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
review of income and wealth
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.024
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1475-4991
pISSN - 0034-6586
DOI - 10.1111/roiw.12191
Subject(s) - earnings , economics , quartile , distribution (mathematics) , demographic economics , contrast (vision) , econometrics , labour economics , mathematics , statistics , physics , confidence interval , mathematical analysis , accounting , optics
Motivated by contradictory evidence on intergenerational mobility in G ermany, I present a cross‐country comparison of G ermany and the U . S ., reassessing the question of whether intergenerational mobility is higher in G ermany than in the U . S . I can reproduce the standard result from the literature, which states that the G erman intergenerational elasticity estimates are lower than those for the U . S . However, based on highly comparable data, even a reasonable degree of variation in the sampling rules leads to similar estimates in both countries. I find no evidence for non‐linearities along the fathers' earnings distribution. In contrast, the analysis shows that mobility is higher for the sons at the lowest quartile of the sons' earnings distribution in both countries. In G ermany this result is mainly driven by a high downward mobility of sons with fathers in the upper middle part of the earnings distribution. The corresponding pattern is clearly less pronounced in the U . S .