Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility A cross country comparison of generational earnings mobility is offered, and the reasons for the degree to which the long run labour market success of children is related to that of their parents is examined. The rich countries differ significantly in the extent to which parental econo...

The paper examines gender differences in intra-firm and inter-firm job changes, including worker-initiated and firm-initiated separations, for white full-time British workers over the period 1991-96. We document four main findings. First, job mobility is high for both men and women, with more than one quarter of the sample changing job each year. Second, the distinction between promotions, quit...

The Gender Gap in Early Career in Mongolia Relatively little is known about the youth labour market in general and about gender differences in Mongolia, one of the fifty poorest countries in the world. This paper addresses the issue by taking advantage of a School to Work Survey (SWTS) on young people aged 15-29 years carried out in 2006. On average, female wages are not lower than those of mal...

Does Increasing Parents’ Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation? Evidence Based on Conditional Second Moments This paper investigates the degree of intergenerational transmission of education for individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Rather than identifying the causal effect of parental education via instrumental variables we exploit the feature of the t...

Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility that use point in time measures of income and earnings suffer from lifecycle and attenuation bias. We consider these issues for the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and British Cohort Study (BCS) for the first time, highlighting how common methods used to deal with these biases do not eradicate these issues. To attempt to overcome this, we...

Despite a strong interest in entrepreneurship, economists have devoted little attention to the role of health insurance availability. I investigate the impact of a unique policy experiment—New Jersey’s Individual Health Coverage Plan—on self-employment. Implemented in August 1993, the IHCP included an extensive set of reforms that loosened the historical connection between traditional employmen...

The Economic Payoff of Name Americanization We examine the impact of the Americanization of names on the labor market outcomes of migrants. We construct a novel longitudinal data set of naturalization records in which we track a complete sample of migrants who naturalize by 1930. We find that migrants who Americanized their names experienced larger occupational upgrading. Some, such as those wh...

Estimates of the Effect of Parents’ Schooling on Children’s Schooling Using Censored and Uncensored Samples In this paper we estimate the impact of parental schooling on child schooling, focus on the problem that children who are still in school constitute censored observations, and evaluate three solutions to it: maximum likelihood approach, replacement of observed with expected years of schoo...

Previous studies of intergenerational income mobility have typically focused at on estimating persistence across generations at the mean of the distribution of sons’ earnings. Here, we use the relatively new unconditional quantile regression (UQR) technique to consider how the association between parental income in childhood and sons’ adult earnings vary across the distribution of sons’ earning...

I study a two-sector model of learning-by-doing with general and sector-speci…c human capital. There is a potential e¢ ciency gain from intersectoral turnover when the sectors have di¤erent complementary production costs or learning curves of di¤erent steepness. If workers are liquidity constrained then there is a bias towards increased intersectoral turnover, resulting in socially ine¢ cient c...