Research Network on Intergenerational Mobility

Intergenerational income persistence is commonly measured as the degree of association between the lifetime income of individuals and that of their parents. Over the last decade, a growing literature has provided national estimates of intergenerational income persistence for a wide range of countries. At the same time, evidence has shown that these estimates are highly sensitive to methodological choices, such as the number of years over which income is averaged, the age at which it is measured, or the set of variables used to predict parental income when it is unobserved. In most cases, data constraints prevent researchers from adopting best practices, limiting comparability across studies. This study systematically compiles national estimates of intergenerational persistence from the literature together with detailed information on their estimation settings. Cross-study variation in these parameters is used to provide a joint assessment of the impact of estimation settings on persistence estimates. Building on these results, national measures are adjusted for methodological differences to provide as consistent a depiction of the variation in intergenerational mobility across countries as possible.