Social Connections and the Persistence of Income Across Generations

We use matched parent-child-employer-employee data from Canada, linked to detailed educational records, to quantify the contribution of social connections to employers to intergenerational income mobility. Sorting across employers accounts for roughly a third of the transmission of income across generations. To estimate the impact of social connections on differential representation across employers, we compare classmates -- those with the same degree from the same institution -- who have different social connections. We find social connections in the labor market explain about 15% of the firm-sorting component of the intergenerational income rank-rank relationship, about a third the explanatory power of education.