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Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality

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  • Britto, Diogo
  • Fonseca, Alexandre
  • Pinotti, Paolo
  • Sampaio, Breno
  • Warwar, Lucas
Abstract
We provide the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility for a developing country, namely Brazil. We measure formal income from tax and employment registries, and we train machine learning models on census and survey data to predict informal income. The data reveal a much higher degree of persistence than previous estimates available for developed economies: a 10 percentile increase in parental income rank is associated with a 5.5 percentile increase in child income rank, and persistence is even higher in the top 5%. Children born to parents in the first income quintile face a 46% chance of remaining at the bottom when adults. We validate these estimates using two novel mobility measures that rank children and parents without the need to impute informal income. We document substantial heterogeneity in mobility across individual characteristics -- notably gender and race -- and across Brazilian regions. Leveraging children who migrate at different ages, we estimate that causal place effects explain 57% of the large spatial variation in mobility. Finally, assortative mating plays a strong role in household income persistence, and parental income is also strongly associated with several key long-term outcomes such as education, teenage pregnancy, occupation, mortality, and victimization.

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  • Britto, Diogo & Fonseca, Alexandre & Pinotti, Paolo & Sampaio, Breno & Warwar, Lucas, 2022. "Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality," CEPR Discussion Papers 17582, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17582
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    Cited by:

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    2. Brunori, Paolo & Ferreira, Francisco H. G. & Neidhöfer, Guido, 2023. "Inequality of opportunity and intergenerational persistence in Latin America," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120555, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Castro, Juan Francisco & Yamada, Gustavo & Medina, Santiago & Armas, Joaquin, 2023. "Economic Mobility and Fairness in a Developing Country: Evidence from Peru," IZA Discussion Papers 16465, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Fatih Guvenen & Luigi Pistaferri & Giovanni L. Violante, 2022. "Global trends in income inequality and income dynamics: New insights from GRID," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 13(4), pages 1321-1360, November.
    5. Javier Cortes Orihuela & Juan D. Díaz & Pablo Gutiérrez Cubillos & Pablo A. Troncoso, 2024. "Everything’s not lost: revisiting TSTSLS estimates of intergenerational mobility in developing countries," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 31(1), pages 66-94, February.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Inequality; Migration; Brazil;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being
    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population

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