Abstract: This paper provides the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility in Spain based on rich administrative data linking millions of parents and children through tax returns. Four main results arise. First, Spain is located somewhere in the middle between high-mobility countries such as Scandinavian countries and low-mobility ones such as the United States or Italy. Second, geographical variation in mobility rates is high in Spain but smaller than in other compared countries. Third, daughters have systematically worse outcomes in both relative and absolute mobility measures than sons, with a gender gap that amounts for almost 13% of per capita national income at the median of the distribution. Fourth, exploiting the high comparability degree of siblings that have the exact same values of observable characteristics, I document a positive  effect of out-migration on various upward mobility outcomes.

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Abstract: OECD countries have high rates of immigration, with 10-30% of their populations born abroad. Understanding the economic mobility of immigrants and their children is of vital importance. Abramitzky, et al. (2021) documented high rates of upward mobility for the children of immigrants in the US, both today and in the past. By contrast, Jensen and Manning (2023) found far lower rates of upward mobility for the children of immigrants in Denmark. This contrast led us to ask: are there general patterns across countries whereby the children of immigrants enjoy high upward mobility, perhaps because of the nature of immigrant investments within families, or is the success of immigrants and their children highly dependent on country context? Are the historically immigration-receiving countries like the US and Canada better able to assimilate immigrants than are the new receiving countries in Europe?. To answer these questions, an international consortium of researchers put together similar administrative data to compare the economic mobility patterns of second-generation migrants in  15 different receiving countries over the past 50 years.

Draft coming soon!