Family Background and Income During the Rise of the Welfare State: Brother Correlations in Income for Swedish Men Born 1932-1968

By Anders Björklund, Markus Jäntti, Matthew J. Lindquist. Social Science Research Network, 2009

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate if the association between family background and income in Sweden has changed for men born between 1932 and 1968. Our main finding is that the share of the variance in long-run income that is attributable to family background, the so-called brother correlation in income, has fallen by some 17% from 0.49 for the cohorts of brothers born in the early 1930s to below 0.32 for the cohorts born around 1950. From then on, the correlations have inched back up to around 0.37. We report suggestive evidence that the decline is driven by changes in education.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c75154e81e8e299fd2378e499f65c2a6e8fa3e20

Citations in the corpus

• Long-Run Trends in the Distribution of Income and Wealth (2014, unknown): “Specifically, Lindert (2000) points out that whenever costs of living differ between rich and poor the dispersion of real wages differ from the dispersion of nominal wages.”