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 California, Berkeley
How do neighborhoods and firms affect intergenerational mobility?
(with David Card and Moises Yi)
We use data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics linked to the 2000 Census to study intergenerational earnings mobility in the United States. We augment the standard intergenerational transmission model relating children’s log earnings to those of their parent with an additional term representing mean log parent earnings in the childhood neighborhood. The between-neighborhood intergenerational relationship is twice as strong as the within-neighborhood relationship, even after adjusting for measurement error in parents’ earnings. Moreover, mean earnings of the parents in a neighborhood capture over 80% of the variation in unrestricted neighborhood effects that reflect differences in “absolute mobility”. Next, we use an AKM framework to decompose parents’, children’s, and neighboring parents’ earnings into person effects and establishment premiums. Children’s person effects are mainly influenced by parents’ and neighbors’ person effects, whereas children’s establishment premiums are mainly influenced by parents’ and neighbors’ establishment premiums. These patterns point to separate channels for human capital and access to jobs in the intergenerational transmission process. Finally, we explore the implications for the Black-white earnings gap. Neighborhoods explain 30% of the Black-white gap in children’s earnings conditional on parents’ earnings, operating largely through gaps in average person effects. Conditional on neighborhood average earnings, children from neighborhoods with higher Black shares achieve higher adult earnings.
25 Sep 2026
11 AM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
5 PM Central Europe
11 PM China
European University Institute
Does Politics Matter? Politics, Policies and Intergenerational Social Mobility
While the impact of politics and policies on socioeconomic outcomes is widely studied, including poverty reduction, income redistribution, and children’s education, the link with intergenerational socioeconomic mobility has not received much attention. Using data from between 17 and 39 countries, and birth cohorts born between the 1920s and 1970s, this paper assesses how the political and policy climate during one’s formative years is associated with intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic occupational status. Looking at pathways from socioeconomic origin to destination through education, and directly within levels of education, it is shown that egalitarian politics is associated with declining intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status. However, the associations are not strong and not always consistent. Education forms a channel for equalization, as the equality of opportunity is comparatively high among children raised in a more egalitarian-oriented polity. A liberal, growth-oriented polity is hardly associated with the level of social mobility in societies.
16 Oct 2026
10 AM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
4 PM Central Europe
10 PM China
Stanford University
Mothers, Schools, and the Making of American Human Capital Mobility
(with Harriet Brookes Gray and Hugo Reichardt)
How did the US become a land of opportunity? Previous historical research on intergenerational mobility has focused on father-son income correlations, masking the role of mothers. We introduce a new mobility measure that incorporates both parents’ human capital, develop a latent variable method leveraging literacy as a proxy, and construct a representative linked panel that includes women. We find that intergenerational mobility—in both human capital and income—rose sharply from the 19th to the 20th century. Initially, maternal human capital was most predictive of children’s outcomes. However, as schooling expanded, this reliance declined and intergenerational mobility rose. Investments in mass education have therefore been central to America’s rise as a mobile society.
13 Nov 2026
11 AM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
5 PM Central Europe
00:00 China (14 Nov)
Nanyang Technological University
Housing Markets and the Belief in Opportunity
(with Wenyi Zhang)
We study how housing-market signals shape beliefs about economic opportunity. Using a randomized information experiment in Singapore, we vary exposure to information about housing price dynamics and housing-related policy signals, then elicit expected social mobility for children from low- and high-social-position families. We find asymmetric belief updating. Rising house prices and higher property taxes lower perceived upward mobility for children from low-social-position families, while leaving beliefs about children from high-social-position families largely unchanged. By contrast, information about slower price growth and expanded subsidies does not produce a corresponding increase in perceived mobility. Our results identify an attainability-based channel of belief formation: housing-market signals shape opportunity beliefs by changing whether advancement appears within reach.
8 Jan 2027
9 AM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
3 PM Central Europe
10 PM China
University of Chicago
Is Zip Code Destiny?
Recent studies argue that 60%-100% of geographic variations in upward mobility in the US are due to the causal effect of neighborhoods. I provide evidence that the identifying assumptions underlying the influential studies are untenable for Denmark using detailed registers. The lessons from Denmark likely generalize. I document life cycle heterogeneity in the neighborhood sorting process invalidating the assumption of constant selection effects by the child’s age when the family moves that is maintained in an influential literature. The neighborhood exposure effects estimated in prominent recent studies reflect only correlational estimates of place effects, not causal ones.
