Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Melissa Favreault on Economy

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we consider how parental education relates to four outcomes in the children's generation: education, lifetime earnings, health, and wealth. By focusing on parents' and children's ranks, we characterize relative mobility in terms of distributions of outcomes and can see patterns that even a relatively disaggregated analysis, like a quintile-based transition matrix, can obscure. Our results show relatively high intergenerational mobility except at extremes, where very low-ranked parents are much more likely to have very low-ranked children and very high-ranked parents are much more likely to have very high-ranked children.

Although many researchers have documented lower levels of upward mobility amongst black families, it is difficult to disentangle the effects of discrimination from differences in (sometimes unobservable) characteristics that also contribute to variation in employment, income, health, housing, and wealth outcomes across groups. As a consequence, findings regarding the presence or absence of discrimination tend to be controversial. This review pulls together several strands of research on the subject, including the statistical analysis of survey data, audit studies comparing market outcomes for similarly qualified individuals who differ along racial lines, and public opinion polling data on discrimination. (Review 1 of 11.)

Children's mobility outcomes are a function of not only their parents' characteristics and resources, but also of the way parents transmit those characteristics and resources across generations. This review assesses the literature on the effects of family structure, resources, and childrearing styles on children's economic outcomes. Particular attention is paid to the challenge of disentangling the impacts of these determinants, which are often highly correlated: high socio-economic status individuals are better able to address their children’s material needs, but are also more likely to form stable, two-parent families and may even tend to employ more effective parenting strategies. (Review 3 of 11.)