TY - JOUR AU - Black,Sandra E. AU - Devereux,Paul J. TI - Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15889 PY - 2010 Y2 - April 2010 DO - 10.3386/w15889 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15889 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15889.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Sandra E. Black Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712 Tel: 512/475-8519 E-Mail: sblack@austin.utexas.edu Paul J. Devereux School of Economics and Geary Institute University College Dublin Belfield, Dublin 4 Ireland E-Mail: devereux@ucd.ie AB - Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has taken an interesting turn. In addition to focusing on obtaining precise estimates of correlations and elasticities, the literature has placed increased emphasis on the causal mechanisms that underlie this relationship. This chapter describes the developments in the intergenerational transmission literature since the 1999 Handbook Chapter. While there have been some important contributions in terms of measurement of elasticities and correlations, we focus primarily on advances in our understanding of the forces driving the relationship and less on the precision of the correlations themselves. ER -