The Sins of the Fathers: Intergenerational Income Mobility in C hina

This paper aims to obtain an accurate estimate of C hina's intergenerational income mobility and to present evidence on its distributional pattern. Using panel data from the C hina H ealth and N utrition S urvey ( CHNS ) over the period 1989–2009, I find that C hina is less mobile than most developed countries. Then, I employ five different approaches to investigate the distributional pattern of C hina's intergenerational mobility across income levels. The results suggest that poor families have relatively high mobility, indicating opportunities for the poor children to escape poverty. Finally, I show that while wealthy fathers are likely to pass on their favorable economic status to their sons, rich sons come from a very wide range of family economic backgrounds.