【第245期双周论坛】Your American Dream is Not Mine!——A New Approach to Estimating Intergenerational Mobility Elasticities

一、主题：Your American Dream is Not Mine!——A New Approach to Estimating Intergenerational Mobility Elasticities

二、主讲人：安永红，德州农工大学经济助理教授（with tenure）。他在约翰霍普金斯大学获得经济学博士学位，研究领域包括微观经济学和产业组织理论，曾在Journal of Econometrics、Journal of Business & Economic Statistics、Journal ofApplied Econometrics、Applied Economics等期刊发表多篇学术论文。

三、时间：2018年6月22日（周五），12：30-13：30

四、地点：学院南路校区主教学楼913会议室

五、主持人：王雅琦，威斯尼斯人金融学院讲师

六、讲座资助：威斯尼斯人引智计划

Abstract: This paper provides a unified framework for estimating intergenerational mobility elasticities(IGE) of children's income with respect to parental income. We allow the IGEs to be heterogeneous, by leaving the relationship of parental and child incomes unspecified, while acknowledgingand addressing the latent nature of both child and parental permanent incomes and the resultedlife-cycle bias. Our framework enables us to propose a formal test of the widely imposed assumption that the intergenerational mobility function is linear. Applying our method to the PanelStudies of Income Dynamics (PSID) data, we decisively reject the commonly imposed linearityassumption and find substantial heterogeneity in the IGEs across the population. The IGEswith respect to parental income exhibit a U-shape pattern. Specifically, there is a considerabledegree of mobility among the broadly defined middle class, but the children of both high- andlow-income parents are more likely to be high- and low-income adults, respectively. Our resultsuggests that the U.S. is indeed a “land of opportunity", just not for everyone! This result alsoprovides valuable insights into the (intertemporal) Great Gatsby curve, suggesting that a higherlevel of inequality within one generation may lead to a higher level of social immobility in thenext generation in the U.S..

[编辑]：张萌