Intergenerational Mobility in Measures of Wellbeing: Consumption, Health and Life Satisfaction
Studies of intergenerational mobility have begun to expand outside of the traditional outcomes such as income, education and occupation, into using alternative measures of wellbeing. In this chapter we survey the evidence on studies of these alternative measures with a focus on health, consumption and life satisfaction. We also incorporate lessons from the income mobility literature that may be relevant for how we think about these alternative measures both conceptually and empirically. We highlight a few approaches that researchers can consider to incorporate alternative measures and we conclude that a widening of our conception of intergenerational mobility to incorporate measures of wellbeing may identify shortfalls in some of our current approaches.
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Copy CitationJonathan Davis, Nathan Deutscher, and Bhashkar Mazumder, "Intergenerational Mobility in Measures of Wellbeing: Consumption, Health and Life Satisfaction," NBER Working Paper 34407 (2025), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34407.
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