American Exceptionalism in a New Light: A Comparison of Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the Nordic Countries, the United Kingdom and the United States

By Markus Ja¨ntti, B. Bratsberg, Knut Røed, Oddbjørn Raaum, R. Naylor, Eva Österbacka, Anders Bjørklund, Tor Eriksson. Social Science Research Network, 2006

469 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop methods and employ similar sample restrictions to analyse differences in intergenerational earnings mobility across the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. We examine earnings mobility among pairs of fathers and sons as well as fathers and daughters using both mobility matrices and regression and correlation coefficients. Our results suggest that all countries exhibit substantial earnings persistence across generations, but with statistically significant differences across countries. Mobility is lower in the U.S. than in the U.K., where it is lower again compared to the Nordic countries. Persistence is greatest in the tails of the distributions and tends to be particularly high in the upper tails: though in the U.S. this is reversed with a particularly high likelihood that sons of the poorest fathers will remain in the lowest earnings quintile. This is a challenge to the popular notion of ’American exceptionalism’. The U.S. also differs from the Nordic countries in its very low likelihood that sons of the highest earners will show downward ’long-distance’ mobility into the lowest earnings quintile. In this, the U.K. is more similar to the U.S..

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b07277495dbda8c494dd5330eef29e6888e9046b

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In Accounting

1. Raj Chetty
2. Stefanie Stantcheva
3. Emmanuel Saez
4. Nathaniel Hendren
5. B. Mazumder
6. Patrizio Piraino
7. Edoardo Teso
8. Sandra E. Black

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Raj Chetty
2. Emmanuel Saez
3. Miles Corak
4. Nathaniel Hendren
5. Stefanie Stantcheva
6. B. Mazumder
7. Patrick M. Kline
8. Matthew J. Lindquist

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Raj Chetty
2. Nathaniel Hendren
3. Miles Corak
4. B. Mazumder
5. Patrick M. Kline
6. Emmanuel Saez
7. Stefanie Stantcheva
8. Sandra E. Black

Citations in the corpus

• A comparison of upward and downward intergenerational mobility in Canada, Sweden and the United States (2014, methodology): “The study closest to ours is by Jäntti et al. (2006)who in addition to examining differences in the IGE, also examine four specific transition probabilities 1 The IGE is also poorly suited for studying group differences in intergenerationalmobility (e.g. immigrants vs. natives) because it is only…”
• Comparable Estimates of Intergenerational Income Mobility in Italy (2007, background): “Based on this flexible approach to mobility, Jantti et al. (2006) found interesting cross-country differences in income persistence at specific parts of the bivariate income distribution.”
• Intergenerational Wealth Mobility in England, 1858–2012: Surnames and Social Mobility (2015, unknown): “Important recent contributions to the measurement of the intergenerational correlation of earnings are Corak, 2006 and Jäntti et al., 2006 (both studies incorporate international comparisons).”
• Intergenerational Top Income Mobility in Sweden – Capitalist Dynasties in the Land of Equal Opportunity? (2012, unknown): “5 For example, Eide and Showalter (1999), Grawe and Mulligan (2002), Couch and Lillard (2004), Grawe (2004), Hertz (2005), Jäntti et al. (2006), and Bratsberg et al. (2007) are all (at least partly) concerned with nonlinear patterns in the overall distribution.”
• The Strugglers: The New Poor in Latin America? (2014, unknown): “39 Jäntti et al. (2006), Isaacs et al. (2008).”
• Where is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States* (2014, result): “, Bjorklund and Jäntti 1997, Jäntti et al. 2006, Corak 2013). Our estimates of the IGE in the U.S. as a whole are similar to those found in prior work, with the exception of Mazumder’s (2005) widely cited estimates, which imply much lower levels of intergenerational mobility than we find here for re”
• Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility (2010, methodology): “…1 provides a summary of IGE estimates and estimated correlations for sons by country (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S.) from Jantti et al. (2006).12 Both the elasticities and correlations suggest an ordering with the lowest persistence in the Nordic countries, higher…”