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.

Media coverage: EL PAIS, Antena3, La SER, LaSexta, El Español, El Confidencial, Diari ARA, TV Galicia, La Opinión A Coruña, La Voz de Galicia, El Pais Negocios

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 

Abstract: We study how the behavior of older peers influences university track choices in Sweden’s centralized, strategy-proof matching system. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the enrollment shares of older high school peers across eight selective university tracks, we document a discouragement effect: a one percentage point rise in older-peer enrollment reduces the probability of ranking the track as one's first choice by 0.15–0.87 percentage points (10–28 % of the mean). This effect is largest among applicants with low to average grades and from the gender in minority in the given track, while high-achievers---especially migrants in Medicine---are unaffected. Our findings reveal a track-specific rank effect of potentially lower self-confidence and heightened perceived competition, highlighting contexts interventions may be necessary to better align aspirations with ability.

The analyses are conducted using registry data from Statistics Sweden, with ethics approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority.