Inequality of Opportunity, Income Mobility, and the Interpretation of Intergenerational Elasticities, Correlations, and Rank-Rank Slopes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2331227 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Pablo A Mitnik (0000-0002-2988-7456, University of Michigan, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1289-1338 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociological Methods & Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-1241 • E-ISSN: 1552-8294 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00491241251352102 |
| OpenAlex | W4412779492 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 68 |
Although there is an extensive methodological literature on the measurement of intergenerational income mobility, there has been limited research on the conceptual interpretation of mobility measures and the methodological implications of those interpretations. In this article, I focus on the three measures of mobility most frequently used in the literature-the intergenerational elasticity (IGE), the intergenerational correlation (IGC), and the rank-rank slope (RRS)-as well as a recently introduced measure, the intergenerational elasticity of expected income (IGEE). I make two main contributions, both related to the conceptual interpretation of mobility measures. First, I specify the formal relationships between those four mobility measures and the measures of inequality of opportunity developed in the luck egalitarian empirical literature on the topic, and determine the methodological implications of the analyses. I show that (a) the IGC is a measure of relative inequality of opportunity for monetary income, (b) the RRS is both a measure of relative inequality of opportunity for income rank and a rescaled measure of absolute inequality of opportunity for income rank, and (c) the products of parental income inequality by the IGEE and IGE are both measures of absolute inequality of opportunity for monetary income that differ in how they measure the value of opportunity sets. Second, relying on a conceptual distinction that has been influential in the field of public finance, the IGE and IGEE have been characterized as 'person-weighted' and 'dollar-weighted' elasticities, respectively, thus raising doubts about the desirability of a recent proposal to replace the IGE by the IGEE as the workhorse elasticity of the mobility field. I show that this contrasting characterization of the two intergenerational elasticities is the joint result of a category mistake-equating quantile-specific elasticities to person-specific elasticities-and of misconstruing the nature of the IGE and the epistemic goal it has been meant to serve. Based on this analysis, I conclude that the case for replacing the IGE with the IGEE remains well-founded
Combinatorics · Demographic economics · Econometrics · Economic inequality · Economics · Income distribution · Inequality · Interpretation (philosophy) · Rank (graph theory) · Rank correlation · Social mobility · Social science · Sociology · Statistics · Computer Science · Income, Poverty, and Inequality · Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies · Mathematics · Social and Cultural Dynamics
Occupational Ghettos
The Elasticity of Taxable Income with Respect to Marginal Tax Rates
The Scandinavian Fantasy
Postsecondary Education and Increasing Wage Inequality
Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility
Life‐Cycle Variations in the Association between Current and Lifetime Income
Much ado about two
Pseudo Maximum Likelihood Methods
Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the United States, 1940 to 2000
Approaches to Inequality of Opportunity
Equality and equal opportunity for welfare
On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice
Estimating the intergenerational elasticity of expected income with short-run income measures
What is Equality? Part 1
A model of intergenerational mobility variation over time and place
Chapter 6 Measuring Circumstances
Individual Responsibility and Equality of Opportunity
Inequality of Opportunity, Income Inequality and Economic Mobility
Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States
The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II
Intergenerational Income Mobility and the Role of Family Background
Life-Cycle Variation in the Association between Current and Lifetime Earnings
Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I
Human Capital and the Rise and Fall of Families
Truncation Bias and the Measurement of Income Inequality
Fortunate Sons
The Log of Gravity
Biases in the Estimation of Intergenerational Earnings Correlations
The Measurement of Inequality of Opportunity
The Intergenerational Transmission of Family-Income Advantages in the United States
Inequality of opportunity in the land of opportunities, 1968–2001
Luck and Equality
Multiplicative Models For Continuous Dependent Variables
Intergenerational Income Elasticities, Instrumental Variable Estimation, and Bracketing Strategies
The Intergenerational Elasticity of What? The Case for Redefining the Workhorse Measure of Economic Mobility
A Forced Critique of the Intergenerational Elasticity of the Conditional Expectation
Equality of Opportunity
Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility
A Very Uneven Playing Field
| Highly cited | No |
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