Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP6316
Authors: Maia Gell; Jos V. RodrÃguez Mora; Chris Telmer
Abstract: We propose a new methodology for measuring intergenerational mobility in economic wellbeing. Our method is based on the joint distribution of surnames and economic outcomes. It circumvents the need for intergenerational panel data, a long-standing stumbling block for understanding mobility. A single cross-sectional dataset is sufficient. Our main idea is simple. If ?inheritance' is important for economic outcomes, then rare surnames should predict economic outcomes in the cross-section. This is because rare surnames are indicative of familial linkages. Of course, if the number of rare surnames is small, this won't work. But rare surnames are abundant in the highly-skewed nature of surname distributions from most Western societies. We develop a model that articulates this idea and shows that the more important is inheritance, the more informative will be surnames. This result is robust to a variety of different assumptions about fertility and mating. We apply our method using the 2001 census from Catalonia, a large region of Spain. We use educational attainment as a proxy for overall economic well-being. Our main finding is that mobility has decreased among the different generations of the 20th century. A complementary analysis based on sibling correlations confirms our results and provides a robustness check on our method. Our model and our data allow us to examine one possible explanation for the observed decrease in mobility. We find that the degree of assortative mating has increased over time. Overall, we argue that our method has promise because it can tap the vast mines of census data that are available in a heretofore unexploited manner.
Keywords: surnames; intergenerational mobility; cross-sectional data analysis; population genetics; assortative mating; siblings
JEL Codes: C31; E24; J1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| rare surnames (J15) | economic outcomes (F61) |
| inheritance (H24) | informativeness of surnames regarding economic outcomes (J79) |
| inheritance (H24) | rare surnames correlate with higher economic outcomes (J79) |
| economic status of parents (I24) | economic status of children (I24) |
| assortative mating (C78) | decrease in intergenerational mobility (J62) |
| decrease in intergenerational mobility (J62) | economic status of parents related to that of children over time (I24) |