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 Black
Department of Economics
University of Texas
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  -