IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/35152.html

Mothers, Schools, and the Making of American Human Capital Mobility

Author

Listed:
  • Lukas Althoff
  • Harriet M. Brookes Gray
  • Hugo Reichardt

Abstract

How did the US become a land of opportunity? Previous historical research on intergenerational mobility has focused on father-son income correlations, masking the role of mothers. We introduce a new mobility measure that incorporates both parents' human capital, develop a latent variable method leveraging literacy as a proxy, and construct a representative linked panel that includes women. We find that intergenerational mobility—in both human capital and income—rose sharply from the 19th to the 20th century. Initially, maternal human capital was most predictive of children's outcomes. However, as schooling expanded, this reliance declined and intergenerational mobility rose. America's investment in mass education has therefore been central to its rise as a mobile society.

Suggested Citation

  • Lukas Althoff & Harriet M. Brookes Gray & Hugo Reichardt, 2026. "Mothers, Schools, and the Making of American Human Capital Mobility," NBER Working Papers 35152, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35152
    Note: CH DAE ED LS PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w35152.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C1 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General
    • H10 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - General
    • H4 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
    • N0 - Economic History - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35152. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.