Virtual Seminar Schedule
The Virtual Seminars will be held monthly. RNIM members please watch out for a registration invitation that will be sent 1-2 weeks before each seminar. We encourage you to forward the registration email to non-members for them to register and attend the seminar series. Registering for a seminar means that you will receive seminar invitations from that point forward.
University of Copenhagen
Education’s equalizing role is probably overstated: Evidence from Danish identical twins
Education is widely recognized as a key channel for intergenerational social mobility. However, most research on this topic relies on frameworks that tend to overstate the returns to schooling and only consider select aspects of family background, such as parental income or class. I propose a new framework based on monozygotic twin correlations that addresses these limitations, revealing that education plays a significantly smaller role in bridging family background and labor market attainment than previously thought. Using data from 10,000 identical twins born in Denmark between 1940 and 1979, my findings show that education mediates only 15–20% of the total family background effect—far less than the 50–75% commonly reported. This discrepancy stems from conventional methods significantly overestimating the returns to education and underscores the need to consider factors beyond schooling to fully understand how privilege is passed through generations.
Forhad Shilpi
24 Jan 2025
10 AM EST
4 PM CET
11 PM China
University of California-Los Angeles
The changing geography of U.S. educational mobility over the twentieth century
(with Paul Mohnen and Shariq Mohammed)
This paper describes the geography of intergenerational educational mobility for both men and women born in the 20th century and its local correlates. We use supervised machine-learning to link 1.7 million men and women in the Social Security Application Records to the full-count 1940 Census, while keeping Type I linking error rates very low, and reweight the linked sample to resemble the national population. We find that the geography of educational mobility was broadly similar to the geography of income mobility, with the highest rates of mobility in the Northeast and the West of the country and the lowest rates of mobility in the South. Counties with high rates of mobility had (i) lower income inequality, (ii) higher community-level literacy rates, (iii) higher levels of economic development, and (iv) greater public good provision. The geography and the correlates of educational mobility were similar for men and women.
Shahe Emran
20 Feb 2025
11 AM EST
5 PM CET
12 AM China
(21 Feb 2025)
New York University
The geography of income polarization and its intergenerational consequences
(with Ananda Martin-Caughey, Andrew Levine, and Jenna Shaw)
Income in the United States has polarized since the 1980s, but little is known about how polarization affects equality of opportunity in society. In this talk, I first introduce an approach for measuring income polarization that flexibly accounts for the expansion and contraction of various ranges of the income distribution. Then, I apply this approach to examine the impact of income polarization on intergenerational mobility. Exploiting the geographic variation of income polarization and intergenerational mobility in the United States, we find that patterns of income polarization vary substantially across commuting zones and are predictive of mobility outcomes, independent of cross-sectional income inequality and a large set of additional commuting zone level controls. Shrinkage of the middle of the income distribution reduces mobility, but changes of the two sides of the distribution have asymmetric effects: expansion of the upper side of the income distribution, but not the lower side, inhibits upward mobility and increases downward mobility among children from all ranges of parental income. These findings reveal an important intergenerational consequence of income polarization: children growing up in places with polarizing income distributions face greater barriers to economic opportunity.
Yi Fan
28 Mar 2025
11 AM EST
4 PM CET
11 PM China
University of Hong Kong
The macroeconomic consequences of family policies
We examine the macroeconomic consequences of large-scale family policies in a heterogeneous-agent overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and child investments, a multi-period demographic structure, and childcare choices. We show that fertility elasticities across the human capital distribution play a central role in shaping the aggregate and distributional policy implications. We find that cash rewards for childbirth raise fertility at the expense of human capital and intergenerational mobility. Meanwhile, average welfare rises as the old-age dependency ratio drops in the long run, leading to lower budget-balancing tac rates and higher consumption. In contrast, childcare and education subsidies are less cost-effective in boosting fertility, but they reduce income inequality and raise intergenerational mobility.
Nazmul Ahsan
22 Apr 2025
10 AM EST
4 PM CET
10 PM China
World Bank
Opportunity and Risk
(with Nazmul Ahsan, M. Shahe Emran, and Hanchen Jiang)
The standard measures of intergenerational mobility do not account for risk. We develop a broader approach where conditional variance of children's outcome is a summary statistic for life-time risks. Conditional variance of children's schooling declines with father's education. We derive risk-adjusted measures of educational mobility by accounting for the risk premium implied by conditional variance. Estimates of risk-adjusted mobility in China, India, and Indonesia suggest that the standard measures overestimate relative and absolute educational mobility. The overestimation is substantial for the disadvantaged children and daughters, but negligible for the children of college-educated fathers.
Yi Fan
23 May 2025
10 AM EST
4 PM CET
10 PM China
MIT Sloan School of Management
The Class Gap in Career Progression: Evidence from US academia
(with Kyra Rodriguez)
Unlike gender or race, class is rarely a focus of research or DEI efforts in elite US occupations. Should it be? In this paper, we document a large class gap in career progression in one labor market: US tenure-track academia. Using parental education to proxy for socioeconomic background, we compare career outcomes of people who got their PhDs in the same institution and field (excluding those with PhD parents). First-generation college graduates are 13% less likely to end up tenured at an R1, and are on average tenured at institutions ranked 9% lower, than their PhD classmates with a parent with a (non-PhD) graduate degree. We explore three mechanisms: (1) productivity, (2) preferences, and (3) discrimination. Research productivity can explain at most a third of the class gap, meaning first-gen college grads are “underplaced” at lower-ranked institutions than their research record would predict. Preferences explain almost none of the class gap. Discrimination likely explains the residual. Specifically, systemic or direct discrimination may arise from a lack of social and cultural capital. We find evidence consistent with this in analyses of coauthor networks and NSF awards. Finally, examining PhDs who work in industry we find a class gap in pay and in managerial responsibilities which widens over the career. This establishes that a class gap in career progression exists in other US occupations beyond academia.
Shahe Emran
20 Jun 2025
10 AM EST
4 PM CET
10 PM China
Princeton University
Changes in the college mobility pipeline since 1900
(with Sarah Quincy)
Going to college has long conferred a large wage premium. We show that the relative premium received by lower-income college-goers has halved since the 1960s. We decompose the steady rise in American higher education’s regressivity using dozens of survey and administrative datasets that document 1900–2020 wage premiums and the composition and value-added of collegiate institutions and majors. Three trends explain two-thirds of rising collegiate regressivity. First, the less-selective and public institutions that disproportionately enroll lower-income students have declined in economic value. Second, lower-income students are increasingly over-represented in America’s shrinking community college sector since 1990. Third, higher-income students have driven declining humanities enrollment and expanding computer science enrollment since the 2000s, increasing their degrees’ value. Differential selection and shifts between four-year institutions are second-order. College-going provided equitable returns before 1960, but collegiate regressivity has curtailed higher education’s potential to reduce inequality and mediates 25 percent of intergenerational income transmission.
Guido Neidhöfer
16 Sep 2025
10 AM EST
4 PM CET
10 PM China
National University of Singapore
Trade and Intergenerational Income Mobility: Theory and Evidence from the U.S
(with Italo Colantone and Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano)
This paper studies the impact of globalization on intergenerational income mobility. Exploiting U.S. data, we find that stronger trade exposure at the commuting zone level lowers the intergenerational income mobility of residents. In particular, higher exposure to Chinese import competition lowers the income mobility of the cohort of U.S. workers born in 1980-1982. We present a general equilibrium theory in which path dependence in sector choice of individuals over generations and mobility frictions determine the dynamics of industrial compositions across locations in a country. The theory predicts that rising import competition reduces intergenerational income mobility, consistent with the empirical findings.
Yi Fan
22 Oct 2025
10 AM EST
4 PM CET
10 PM China
Bank of Italy
Educational Mobility Across Multiple Generations in Indonesia
(with Sarah Cattan, Jan Stuhler, and Po Yin Wong)
Standard intergenerational measures have been shown to understate the long-run persistence of socioeconomic advantages in developed countries. We study theoretically and empirically whether this pattern extends to less developed settings, using Indonesia as a case study. We estimate multigenerational correlations in education across three generations, using five waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) and the 1995 and 2005 Censuses. Contrary to previous findings, we find a negative grandparent-grandchild coefficient, implying greater educational mobility than the intergenerational correlations from developing contexts typically suggest. We build a theoretical framework to identify two key factors influencing multigenerational transmission in developing countries: (1) financial and credit constraints, and (2) cultural norms surrounding marital sorting. To test the salience of these mechanisms in Indonesia, we analyze regional variations in marital practices, education expenditures, and the impact of 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Forhad Shilpi
14 Nov 2025
10 AM EST
4 PM CET
11 PM China
