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Like father, like son? A comparison of absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility in Germany and the US

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  • Maximilian Stockhausen

    (German Economic Institute)

Abstract

Are children better off than their parents? This highly debated question in politics and economics is investigated by analysing the trends in absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility for Germany and the US. High quality panel data is used for this purpose; the SOEP for Germany and the PSID for the US. In Germany, 67% of sons born between 1955 and 1975 earned a significantly higher real long-run labour income than their fathers. Those with fathers from the lowest earnings bracket were particularly mobile in absolute terms. In contrast, the fraction of US sons earning more than their fathers is 60% on average for the same cohorts. Their share decreased from 66% in the 1956–60 birth cohort to 48% in the 1971–75 birth cohort, while it changed very little in Germany. Overall, absolute as well as relative labour income mobility is larger in Germany than in the US. This indicates that economic growth has been distributed more broadly in Germany than in the US. While the majority of German males has been able to share in the country’s rising prosperity and are better off than their fathers, US males continue to lose ground. Hence, Chetty et al. (Science 356:398–406, 2017) seem to be right when they say that the American Dream is slowly fading away.

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  • Maximilian Stockhausen, 2021. "Like father, like son? A comparison of absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility in Germany and the US," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 19(4), pages 667-683, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:joecin:v:19:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s10888-021-09483-w
    DOI: 10.1007/s10888-021-09483-w
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    Cited by:

    1. Tomas Kennedy & Peter Siminski, 2022. "Are We Richer than Our Parents Were? Absolute Income Mobility in Australia," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 98(320), pages 22-41, March.
    2. Liss, Erik & Korpi, Martin & Wennberg, Karl, 2023. "Absolute income mobility and the effect of parent generation inequality: An extended decomposition approach," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Absolute intergenerational mobility; Inequality; Labour income distribution; Relative intergenerational mobility;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion

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