Abstract: 

This paper provides new evidence on intergenerational income mobility in Spain using rich administrative data linking millions of parents and children over 25 years. We find that Spain ranks in the middle-to-lower tier of intergenerational mobility: a 10 percentile point increase in parental income rank is associated with a 2.74 percentile point increase in a child's adult income rank, and the probability of rising from the bottom to the top income quintile is 10.4%. Notably, income persistence is particularly strong at the top of the distribution, exceeding levels in the United States. Our analysis also indicates a deterioration in intergenerational mobility among cohorts born in the last two decades of the twentieth century, especially those entering the labor market during the Great Recession. Methodologically, we introduce a Bayesian hierarchical modeling approach that yields more precise and robust estimates of mobility at granular geographic levels by borrowing strength across units, which is crucial for overcoming spatial data sparsity. Using these estimates, we show that variation in upward mobility in Spain exhibits a strong regional dimension alongside neighborhood-level differences. Finally, by exploiting variation in the age at which children move with their families, we document large causal effects of growing up in a better neighborhood, which explain around 60% of the observed geographic variation in upward mobility rates.

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Abstract: We estimate the intergenerational mobility of children of immigrants in eleven European and four non-European countries. In all destinations, immigrant parents earn less than the local born, but the children of immigrants experience substantial – and for daughters, often complete – convergence. The remaining gap between children of immigrants and locals is largest in countries like Denmark and France where children of immigrants are raised near the bottom of the income distribution. After controlling for parental income, daughters of immigrants outearn daughters of the local born in almost all countries, and the earnings gap diminishes (but remains negative) for sons. Sons of immigrants lag particularly behind in otherwise high-mobility countries like Austria and the Netherlands, perhaps because they are excluded from mobility-enhancing institutions. All children of immigrants have higher mobility in countries with easier access to citizenship for the second generation, and with positive attitudes toward immigrants