Research Report A Detailed Picture of Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital
Austin Nichols, Melissa M. Favreault
Display Date
File
File
Download Report
(364.26 KB)

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.
Research Areas Economic mobility and inequality
Tags Income and wealth distribution
Policy Centers Income and Benefits Policy Center