Abstract: This paper provides the first estimates of intergenerational mobility in the antebellum United States. Using surname-based estimators and novel data on colonial migration, I examine the intergenerational mobility of Americans who descended from transported English convicts, who accounted for 10% of all white immigrants during the colonial period. I find that having a convict ancestor is associated with a 9% lower probability of real estate ownership in 1850, a disadvantage that persists at 8% by 1940. This pattern extends to various socioeconomic outcomes. Leveraging exogenous variation in convicts' arrival locations in the US, I show that geographic factors play a crucial role in the persistence of inequality. I further demonstrate that attributes specific to convicts, such as criminal tendencies or social stigmatization, cannot fully account for these results. I calculate a lower-bound intergenerational wealth elasticity estimate of 0.63 between 1750 and 1850. These findings provide new insights into the long-term persistence of initial disadvantages and the structural barriers to social mobility faced by the bottom strata of society.
Abstract: Parent-child associations in economic outcomes are modest, yet multigenerational associations are much larger than geometrically extrapolating them implies. In this paper, I propose a power law in the number of generations to predict multigenerational associations from the parent-child association alone. The power law follows when economic status is transmitted through many channels, such as wealth, location, occupation, and networks, each at its own rate. The fast channels explain most of the parent-child association, while the slow channels drive persistence over many generations. Using a corpus of published multigenerational estimates from many countries, outcomes, and periods, I show that the power law is the most accurate of the models the literature uses and the only one that does not systematically under-predict multigenerational associations. Using linked US Censuses from 1850 to 1940, I then document multiple transmission channels directly. Location is transmitted at a much higher rate than the rest of occupational status, and the data reject transmission at a single rate.
Abstract: Intergenerational mobility is usually summarized by a single parent-child slope. That statistic is useful, but it implies that dynastic correlations should disappear within a few generations and that inequality-mobility patterns such as the Great Gatsby curve should be difficult to reproduce. We show that both problems are resolved by a minimal extension of the canonical AR(1) model: adding a permanent lineage component. Using linked full-count U.S. censuses from 1860 to 1940, we assemble 10.6 million father-son pairs in 2.8 million dynasties and compare the resulting AR(1)+lineage-effects model with standard autoregressive alternatives. Estimated only on 1860-1900 data, AR models predict that long-run persistence should vanish and underpredict the rise in occupational-score inequality observed in 1920 and 1940. The lineage-effects model, by contrast, matches both the correlation with the 1860 patriarch and the path of the Gini out of sample. We then derive closed-form steady-state expressions for inequality and persistence as functions of within-lineage reversion, lineage dispersion, and transitory shocks. The decomposition shows that dispersion in permanent lineage means, not the parent-child elasticity, is the main driver of long-run inequality and persistence. This yields a structural Great Gatsby curve and reframes mobility policy: reducing inherited lineage advantage has larger long-run implications than marginally increasing parent-child mobility.
Colonial Migration to the US (with Taylor Jaworski)
Early Life Events and Legal Decision-Making of American Judges (with Pablo Zarate)
Historical Development of Inequality of Opportunity in the United States (with Francisco Ferreira)