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Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Estimating the Intergenerational
Elasticity and Rank Association in the
US: Overcoming the Current Limitations
of Tax Data
Bhashkar Mazumder

REVISED
September 2015
WP 2015-04

Estimating the Intergenerational Elasticity and Rank Association in the US:
Overcoming the Current Limitations of Tax Data

Bhashkar Mazumder*
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
September, 2015

Abstract:
Ideal estimates of the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) in income require a large panel of income
data covering the entire working lifetimes for two generations. Previous studies have
demonstrated that using short panels and covering only certain portions of the lifecycle can lead
to considerable bias. I address these biases by using the PSID and constructing long time
averages centered at age 40 in both generations. I find that the IGE in family income in the U.S.
is likely greater than 0.6 suggesting a relatively low rate of intergenerational mobility in the U.S.
I find similar sized estimates for the IGE in labor income. These estimates support the prior
findings of Mazumder (2005a, b) and are also similar to comparable estimates reported by
Mitnik et al (2015). In contrast, a recent influential study by Chetty et al (2014) using tax data
that begins in 1996, estimates the IGE in family income for the U.S. to be just 0.344 implying a
much higher rate of intergenerational mobility. I demonstrate that despite the seeming
advantages of extremely large samples of administrative tax data, the age structure, and limited
panel dimension of the data used by Chetty et al leads to considerable downward bias in
estimating the IGE. I further demonstrate that the sensitivity checks in Chetty et al regarding the
age at which children’s income is measured, and the length of the time average of parent income
used to estimate the IGE, are also flawed due to these data limitations. There are also concerns
that tax data, unlike survey data, may not adequately reflect all sources of family income.
Estimates of the rank-rank slope, Chetty et al’s preferred estimator, are more robust to the
limitations of the tax data but are also downward biased and modestly overstate mobility.
However, Chetty et al’s main findings of sizable geographic differences within the US in rank
mobility, are unlikely to be affected by these biases. I conclude that researchers should continue
to use both the IGE and rank based measures depending on their preferred concept of mobility.
It also important for researchers to have adequate coverage of key portions of the lifecycle and to
consider the possible drawbacks of using administrative data.

*I thank Andy Jordan and Karl Schulze for outstanding research assistance. I thank participants
at seminars at IZA, the New York Fed, the Chicago Fed, the University of Bergen and the
University of Tennessee as well as Nathaniel Hendren for helpful comments. I also thank a
referee for valuable comments and guidance. The views expressed here do not reflect those of
the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or the Federal Reserve system.

I.

Introduction
Inequality of opportunity has become a tremendously salient issue for policy makers

across many countries in recent years. The sharp rise in inequality has given rise to fears that
economic disparities will persist into future generations. This has led to a heightened focus on
the literature on intergenerational economic mobility. This body of research, which is now
several decades old, seeks to understand the degree to which economic status is transmitted
across generations. A critical first step in understanding this literature and correctly interpreting
its findings is having a sound understanding of the measures that are being used and what they
do and do not measure. This paper focuses on two prominent measures of intergenerational
mobility, the intergenerational elasticity (IGE), and the rank-rank slope, and discusses several
key conceptual and measurement issues related to these estimators.
The IGE has a fairly long history of use in economics dating back to papers from the
1980s. It is generally viewed as a useful and transparent summary statistic capturing the rate of
“regression to the mean”. It can, for example, tell us how many generations (on average) it
would take the descendants of a low income family to rise to the mean level of log income. In
recent years many notable advances have been made in terms of measurement and issues
concerning life-cycle bias (e.g. Jenkins, 1987; Solon, 1992; Mazumder, 2005a; Grawe, 2006;
Böhlmark and Lindquist, 2006; Haider and Solon, 2006). 1 As a result of these contributions,
most recent US estimates of the IGE in family income are generally around 0.5 or higher. 2

1

Reviews of this literature can be found in Solon (1999) and Black and Devereaux (2011).
Solon’s (1992) estimate is 0.483. Hertz (2005) reports an IGE of 0.538. Hertz (2006) finds the IGE to be 0.58.
Bratsberg et al (2007) estimate the IGE of family income on earnings to be 0.54. Jäntti et al’s (2006) estimate of
the same measure is 0.517. Mitnik et al’s (2015) estimate of the standard IGE is between 0.55 and 0.74. Note that
all of these studies (like Chetty et al, 2014) report some variant of the IGE with respect to family income. Of
course, many other studies have used a different income concept such as labor market earnings.

2

2

Thus far, no study of intergenerational mobility in the US has yet been conducted that has
used very long time averages of family income of parents and has also utilized averages of
family income in both generations centered at age 40, where lifecycle bias is minimized.3 This
paper fills this void in the literature by using PSID data that meet these requirements. Using up
to 15 year averages of income in the parent generation yields estimates of the IGE with respect to
family income of sons that are greater than 0.6. I also find that the IGE with respect to the labor
income of male household heads is greater than 0.6 and very similar to the estimate found by
Mazumder (2005a) using social security earnings data. 4
These results stand in stark contrast with the results in a recent highly influential study by
Chetty et al (2014), who use large samples drawn from IRS tax records and produce estimates of
the IGE in family income of just 0.344 suggesting significantly greater intergenerational
mobility. Furthermore, Chetty et al argue that none of the previous biases identified in the
literature on IGE estimation apply to their data. Given the importance of the IGE as one of the
key conceptual measures of intergenerational mobility, it is worth revisiting the measurement
issues in the context of their sample. This exercise is not only useful for revisiting the specific
results of Chetty et al, but also holds more general lessons for other research seeking to exploit
administrative data to measure intergenerational mobility.
The IRS-based intergenerational sample used by Chetty et al is fundamentally limited in
a few key respects that ultimately stems from the fact that the data only begins in 1996. First,
children’s income is only measured in 2011 and 2012. This is at a relatively early point in the
3

The closest is Mitnik et al (2015) who use 9-years of parent income and children between the ages of 35 and 38.
Chetty et al (2014) suggest that the high estimates in Mazumder (2005a) are solely due to data imputations of
fathers’ SSA earnings that are topcoded in some years and are not the result of using longer-time averages of
father earnings. Below, I reiterate arguments against that claim that were originally discussed in Mazumder
(2005a) but subsequently ignored by Chetty et al 2014 in their Appendix E discussion. I also point to other studies
in the literature that are supportive of the findings in Mazumder (2005a). It is notable that this study yields similar
estimates to Mazumder (2005a) while requiring no imputations of income.
4

3

life cycle for cohorts born between 1980 and 1982 (ages 29 to 32) and during a period when
unemployment was quite high in the US. This age range is one in which we would expect
substantial life cycle bias in producing IGE estimates (Haider and Solon, 2006). Moreover,
relative to a more ideal data structure, where cohorts of children could be chosen such that they
were observed over the 31 years spanning the ages of 25 to 55, Chetty et al are limited to using
only 6 percent of the lifecycle. Second, parents’ income is also measured for only a short period
(5 years) covering just 16 percent of the lifecycle and at a relatively late period in life. Roughly
25% of observations of fathers’ income in their sample are measured at age 50 or higher. The
literature has shown that starting around the age of 50 a substantial share of the variance in
income is due to transitory fluctuations. This leads to substantial attenuation of the IGE relative
to what would be found if one used lifetime income for the parents (Haider and Solon, 2006;
Mazumder, 2005a).

Third, recent research has established that administrative data can

sometimes lead to worse measurement error than survey data, particularly at the bottom end of
the income distribution (e.g. Abowd and Stinson, 2013 and Hokayem et al., 2012, 2015).
It is important to make it very clear that the main focus of Chetty et al is not their national
estimates of the IGE. Instead, the authors make an important contribution to the literature by
producing the first estimates of a different measure of mobility, rank mobility, at a very detailed
level of U.S. geography. Notably, they provide evidence of substantial heterogeneity across the
U.S. As I discuss below, the biases that affect their national estimates of the IGE likely have
little effect on their main conclusions regarding geographic differences.
The limitations of the tax data for intergenerational analysis can be sharply contrasted
with the PSID sample used in this paper. In the PSID sample, family income is observed in both
generations over a vastly larger portion of the lifecycle and the time averages are centered over

4

the prime working years in both generations. I estimate the IGE using this closer to “ideal”
sample and then show how the estimates change if I impose the same kinds of data limitations
that exist in the IRS data. The results show that the data limitations lead to IGE estimates that
are roughly half the size of the estimates with the complete data and similar in magnitude to the
estimates of Chetty et al. A very similar pattern of results is also found by Mitnik et al (2015). 5
Chetty et al also find the IGE to be very sensitive to how they choose to impute the
income of children who report no family income during 2011 and 2012. However, it is the
limited panel dimension of their data and their reliance on administrative data which makes their
analysis susceptible to this problem. Had they been able to observe the income of children
during later periods of the lifecycle and other sources of income, then such imputation becomes
unnecessary. 6 This is important because it is their concern about the robustness of the IGE that
led Chetty et al to using rank-based estimators. 7 This contrasts with other studies that have also
used rank-based measures to study intergenerational mobility but for conceptual reasons. 8
Given the recent shift in the literature to using rank-based measures, it is useful to
distinguish the measurement concerns with the IGE from the conceptual differences between the
two estimators. In short, both measures can provide useful insights about different mobility
concepts. Since certain questions are best answered by the IGE, researchers should continue to
use that estimator as at least one tool in their arsenal. Nevertheless, rank-based estimators are
also valuable. In addition to providing information on a different concept of mobility, positional
5

Mitnik et al (2015) use IRS data that begins in 1987 enabling children to be observed into their late 30s and for
parent income to be measured over 9 years. Not only do Mitnik et al also produce similar sized estimates to the
PSID results when using a comparable methodology (0.55 to 0.74), but they also show that they can match the
Chetty et al estimates if they restrict their analysis to 29-32 year olds and use five year averages of parent income.
6
Mitnik et al (2015) introduce a new approach to estimating the IGE that enables them to overcome this sensitivity
to years of missing income when using a small window to measure child income. I discuss this in section 3.
7
Dahl and Deliere (2008) also shift to rank based measures based on concerns regarding the robustness of the IGE
but their concerns revolve around a different measurement issue than Chetty et al which I discuss in section 3.
8
See Bhattacharya and Mazumder (2011), Corak et al (2014), Mazumder (2014), Davis and Mazumder (2015) and
Bratberg et al, 2015.

5

mobility, rank-based measures are also useful for distinguishing upward versus downward
movements, making subgroup comparisons, and for identifying nonlinearities. I would argue
that even if Chetty et al had found the IGE to be perfectly robust in their tax data, it would still
be preferable to use rank-mobility measures to understand geographic differences. This is
because an IGE estimated in, say, Charlotte, North Carolina would only be informative about the
rate of regression to the mean income in Charlotte. If ranks are fixed to the national distribution,
then rank mobility measures enable a more meaningful comparison across cities.
Finally, I use the PSID to estimate the rank-rank slope. The estimates (0.4 or higher) are
only moderately larger than what is found with the IRS data (0.341) or what is found with the
PSID data when imposing the tax data limitations. Although the rank-rank slope may be more
robust to the data limitations of the IRS sample than the IGE, it is still not perfect and suggests
that the rate of intergenerational mobility even by rank-based measures may be overstated by the
tax data. This is broadly in line with findings for Sweden (Nybom and Stuhler, 2015). In the
future as the panel length of US tax data increases, these biases will recede in importance.
However, it is uncertain whether researchers will be able to obtain tax data in future decades.
I conclude that researchers should continue to use the IGE if that is the conceptual
parameter of interest. Even when the ideal data is not available, researchers can still attempt to
assess the extent of the bias based on prior research. The rest of the paper proceeds as follows.
Section 2 describes conceptual differences between the IGE and the rank-rank slope. Section 3
discusses measurement issues with the IGE and outlines an “ideal” dataset. It then compares this
ideal dataset with Chetty et al’s IRS-based sample and samples that can be constructed with
publicly available PSID data. Section 4 describes the PSID data. Section 5 presents the main
results and Section 6 concludes.

6

II.

Conceptual Issues
The concept of regression to the mean over generations has a long and notable tradition

going back to the Victorian era social scientist Sir Francis Galton who studied, among other
things, the rate of regression to the mean in height between parents and children. Modern social
scientists have continued to find this concept insightful as a way of describing the rate of
intergenerational persistence in a particular outcome and to infer the rate of mobility as the flip
side of persistence. In particular, economists have focused on the intergenerational elasticity
(IGE). The IGE is the estimate of β obtained from the following regression:
(1)

y1i = α + βy0i + εi

where y1i is the log income of the child’s generation and y0i is the log of income in the parents’
generation. 9 The estimate of β provides a measure of intergenerational persistence and 1 - β can
be used as a measure of mobility. For simplicity, if we assume that the intergenerational
relationship actually follows a simple autoregressive process then one can use β to extrapolate
how long it would take for gaps in log income between families to recede. 10 For example,
consider a family whose log annual income is around 9.8 ($18,000). We might be interested in
knowing roughly how many generations it would take (on average) for the descendants of this
family’s log income to be within 0.05 of the national average log income of 11.2 ($73,000). If
for example, the IGE is around 0.60 as claimed by Mazumder (2005a) then it would take 7
generations (175 years). On the other hand if the IGE is around 0.34 as claimed by Chetty et al
Often the regression will include age controls but few other covariates since β is not given a causal interpretation
but rather reflects all factors correlated with parent income
10
Recent research has cast doubt on the simple AR(1) model arguing that there may be independent effects
emanating from prior generations such as grandparents and great-grandparents (Lindahl et al; 2014).
Nevertheless, the AR(1) assumption provides a useful first approximation and conveys the general point about why
the magnitude of the estimates might matter.
9

7

(2014) then it would take just 4 generations.

Clearly, the two estimates have profoundly

different implications on the rate of intergenerational mobility by this metric. If the rate of
regression to the mean is, in fact, what we are interested in knowing, then the IGE is what we
ought to estimate.

For example, some papers find that the IGE is particularly useful for

calibrating structural models of interest (e.g. DeNardi and Yang, 2015, Lee and Seshadri, 2005)
The concept of regression to the mean is also widely used in other aspects of economics such as
the macroeconomic literature on differences in per-capita income across countries (e.g. Barro
and Sala-i-Martin, 1992).
The rank–rank slope on the other hand is about a different concept of mobility, namely
positional mobility. For example, a rank-rank slope of 0.4 suggests that the expected difference
in ranks between the adult children of two different families would be about 4 percentiles if the
difference in ranks among their parents was 10 percentiles. How are the two measures related?
Chetty et al (2014) point out that that the rank-rank slope is very closely related to the
intergenerational correlation (IGC) in log income. They and many others have also shown that
the IGE is equal to the IGC times the ratio of the standard deviation of log income in the child’s
generation to the standard deviation of log income in the parents’ generation:
𝜎𝜎

𝐼𝐼𝐼𝐼𝐼𝐼 = 𝐼𝐼𝐼𝐼𝐼𝐼 𝜎𝜎𝑦𝑦1

(2)

𝑦𝑦0

This relationship is sometimes taken to imply that a rise in inequality would lead the IGE
to rise but not affect the IGC and that therefore, the IGC may be a preferred measure that avoids
a “mechanical” effect of inequality. By extension one might also prefer the rank-rank slope if
one accepts this argument. Several comments are worth making here. First, in reality the
parameters are all jointly determined by various economic forces. In the absence of a structural
model one cannot meaningfully talk about holding “inequality” fixed. For example, a change in
8

β might cause inequality to rise, rather than the reverse, or both might be altered by some third

force such as rising returns to skill. The mathematical relationship shown in (2) does not
substitute for a behavioral relationship and so we cannot truly isolate forces driving inequality
from the IGE. Second, even if it was the case that the IGC or rank-rank slope was a measure that
was “independent of inequality”, that doesn’t mean that society shouldn’t continue to be
interested in the rate of regression to the mean. It may well be the case that it is precisely
because of the rise in inequality that societies are increasingly concerned about intergenerational
persistence and so incorporating the effects of inequality may actually be critical to
understanding the rates of mobility that policy makers want to address. Mitnik et al (2015) for
example, argue in favor of the IGE precisely because it incorporates distributional changes.
In addition to providing useful information about positional mobility, the rank-rank slope
has other attractive features. Perhaps its’ most useful advantage over the IGE is that it can be
used to measure mobility differences across subgroups of the population with respect to the
national distribution. This is because the IGE estimated within groups is only informative about
persistence or mobility with respect to the group specific mean whereas the rank-rank slope can
be estimated based on ranks calculated based on the national distribution. Chetty et al (2014)
were able to use this to characterize mobility for the first time at an incredibly fine geographic
level. Mazumder (2014) used other “directional” rank mobility measures to compare differences
in intergenerational mobility between blacks and whites in the U.S. However, for characterizing
intergenerational mobility at the national level both the IGE and the rank-rank slope are suitable
depending on which concept of mobility a researcher is interested in studying.
III.

Measurement Issues and the Ideal Intergenerational Sample

Measurement Issues
9

The literature on intergenerational mobility has highlighted two key measurement
concerns that I briefly review. The first issue is attenuation bias that arises from measurement
error or transitory fluctuations in parent income. In an ideal setting the measures of y1 and y0 in
equation (1) would be measures of lifetime or permanent income, but in most datasets we only
have short snapshots of income that can contain noise and attenuate estimates of the IGE. Solon
(1992) showed that using a single year of income as a proxy for lifetime income of fathers can
lead to considerable bias relative to using a 5 year average of income. Using the PSID, Solon
concluded that the IGE in annual labor market earnings was 0.4 “or higher”. Mazumder (2005a)
used the SIPP matched to social security earnings records and showed that using even a 5-year
average can lead to considerable bias and estimated the IGE in labor market earnings to be
around 0.6 when using longer time averages of fathers earnings (up to 16 years). Mazumder
argues that the key reason that a 5-year average is insufficient is that the transitory variance in
earnings tends to be highly persistent and appeals to the findings of U.S. studies of earnings
dynamics that support this point. Using simulations based on parameters from these other
studies, Mazumder shows that the attenuation bias from using a 5-year average in the data is
close to what one would expect to find based on the simulations. In a separate paper that is less
well known, Mazumder (2005b) showed that if one uses short term averages in the PSID and
uses a Hetereoscedastic Errors in Variables (HEIV) estimator that adjusts for the amount of
measurement error or transitory variance contained in each observation, then that the PSID
adjusted estimate of the IGE is also around 0.6.
This latter paper is a useful complement because unlike the social security earnings data
used by Mazumder (2005a) the PSID data is not topcoded and doesn’t require imputations.
Chetty et al (2014) has contended that the larger estimates of the IGE in Mazumder (2005a) were
10

due to the nature of the imputation process rather than due to larger time averages of fathers’
earnings. Specifically, in cases where earnings were above the social security taxable maximum
they were imputed by using the mean earnings level by race and education level from other data
sources.

Mazumder acknowledges that this moves a step in the direction towards

“instrumenting” for fathers earnings based on demographic characteristics but argues that it is
not obvious that this imparts an upward bias and may well lead to a downward bias. 11
Mazumder also shows that when using up to 7 year averages and dropping fathers who are ever
topcoded, which is about half of the sample, that the resulting IGE of 0.439 (N=1144) is not very
different from the IGE of 0.472 (N=2240) for the full sample. Mazumder further argues that this
robustness check of dropping fathers who are ever topcoded, may impart a downward bias due to
a potential selection effect of eliminating father son-pairs whose IGE may be higher because they
are selected from the top of the income distribution. 12 In any event, a number of other studies in
addition to Mazumder (2005b), that also do not require imputed data, and in some cases use
administrative tax data, demonstrate that longer time averages lead to substantially higher IGE
estimates. These studies include: Nilsen et al (2012); Gregg et al (2013); Mazumder and Acosta,
2014; and Mitnick et al, 2015.

11

See footnote 13 in Mazumder (2005a). That footnote explains why in the presence of lifecycle bias, an IV
estimate of the IGE for sons who are younger than 40 and fathers who are older than 40 leads to downward bias.
The mean age of sons in Mazumder (2005a) is 32 and the mean age of fathers in 1984 is 47. Chetty et al (2014)
ignore this point when they discuss Mazumder (2005a) in their Appendix E.
12
Mitnik et al (2015), for example, find that the IGE is higher at the upper half of the income distribution. Chetty
et al (2014) in their Appendix E do not address this selection argument in their discussion of Mazumder’s Table 6
and imply that the results of the robustness check are explained by an upward bias due to IV. Mazumder (2005a)
points out that if he uses longer time averages than 7 years and also drops fathers who are ever topcoded that this
results in dramatically smaller samples that are likely to be highly selected and are likely to be uninformative about
the effects of topcoding. One possible way to gauge the potential upward or downward bias of using imputing
topcoded values would be to run simulations with fake data where one can use a range of parameter values to
assess the magnitude of the bias.

11

The second critical measurement concern in the literature concerns lifecycle bias best
encapsulated by Haider and Solon (2006). One aspect of this critique concerns the effects of
measuring children’s income when they are too young. Children who end up having high
lifetime income often have steeper income trajectories than children who have lower lifetime
income. Therefore if income is measured at too young an age it can lead to an attenuated
estimate of the IGE in lifetime income. Haider and Solon show that this bias can be considerable
and is minimized when income is measured at around age 40. A related issue is that transitory
fluctuations are not constant over the lifecycle but instead follow a u-shaped pattern over the
lifecycle (Baker and Solon, 2003; Mazumder, 2005a). This implies that measuring parents’
income when they are either too young or (especially) when they are too old can also attenuate
estimates of the IGE. While there are econometric approaches one can use to correct for
lifecycle bias, one simple approach is to simply center the time averages of both children’s and
parents’ income around the age of 40. Using this approach with the PSID, Mazumder and
Acosta estimate the IGE to be around 0.6. Mitnik et al (2015) also use this approach with IRS
data covering older cohorts who are observed as late as age 38 and find that both sources of bias
are quantitatively important. Further, Nilsen et al (2012), Gregg et al (2014) and Nybom and
Stuhler, (2015) using data from other countries, show that both time averaging and life-cycle bias
play a role in attenuating IGE coefficients. Importantly, these studies find that these biases
matter even when using administrative data. 13
Comparisons of Intergenerational Samples
To better understand the limitations with currently available intergenerational samples in
the US with respect to these measurement issues, it is useful to think about what an ideal sample
13

Chetty et al speculate that perhaps they find that time averaging and life cycle bias don’t matter because of their
use of administrative data which they suspect to be less error prone than survey data.

12

would look like. In an ideal setting we would want to construct an intergenerational sample
where income is measured for both generations throughout the entire working life cycle, say
between the ages of 25 and 55. 14 For example, suppose our data ends in 2012 (as in Chetty et
al); then for full lifecycle coverage for the children’s generation we would want cohorts of
children who were born in 1957 or earlier. For the 1957 cohort we would measure their income
between 1982 and 2012. For the 1956 cohort we would measure income between 1981 and 2011
and so on. Suppose that for the parents’ generation, the mean age at the time the child is born is
25. Then for the 1957 cohort we would collect income data from 1957 to 1987, from 1956 to
1986 for the parents of the 1956 birth cohort and so on. With such a dataset in hand we would be
confident that we would have measures of lifetime income that are largely error-free and would
also be free of lifecycle bias.
Unfortunately, for most countries, including the US, it is difficult to construct an
intergenerational dataset with income data going back to the 1950s. 15 Still, we can come
somewhat close to this ideal sample with publicly available survey data in the Panel Study of
Income Dynamics (PSID). 16

The PSID began in 1968 and started collecting income data

beginning in 1967 for a nationally representative sample of about 5000 families. The 1957
cohort would have been 11 years old at the time the PSID began so this cohort along with those
born as early as 1951 would have been under the age of 18 at the beginning of the survey. The
approach I take in this paper is to construct time averages of both parent and child income
14

The precise end points are debatable but for measurement purposes one might want to ensure that most
sample members have finished schooling and that most sample members have not yet retired. In theory,
however, it may be better to consider earnings even at young ages when adolescents may have chosen to forego
earnings for human capital accumulation that pays off later in life. In any case, the main point of the argument in
this section would still hold if one used a much broader age range.
15
The SIPP-SER data used by Mazumder (2005) and Dahl and Deliere (2008) meets some but not all of these
requirements.
16
The code used to construct the main estimates in this paper will be made available to researchers either through
the author’s website or through personal communication.

13

centered around the age of 40 in order to minimize life-cycle bias. For parents, these time
averages include income obtained between the ages of 25 and 55 and for children these averages
include income obtained between the ages of 35 and 45.
Relative to the ideal sample, the PSID sample is close in several regards. Since it covers
the 1967 to 2010 period it is able to utilize large windows of the lifecycle for both generations.
For example, for the 16 cohorts born between 1951 and 1965, in principle, income can be
measured in all years that cover the age range between 35 and 45. For the cohorts born between
1967 and 1975, their parents’ income can also be measured through the ages of 25 and 55. Of
course, attrition from the survey diminishes the size of the actual samples with observations in all
of these years but at least the potential for such coverage is there. 17
Now let us contrast this with the limitations faced by Chetty et al (2014) in their analysis
of currently available IRS data. First the tax data is currently only digitized going back to 1996,
which is far from what the ideal dataset would require (1957), or even what is available in the
PSID (1967). Therefore, there is no birth cohort for whom the income of parents can be
measured for the entire 31 year time span between the ages of 25 and 55. Furthermore, the
authors chose to limit the analysis to just a 5-year average between 1996 and 2000. A possible
explanation for this choice is that lengthening their time averages further would have
necessitated measuring income when parents were at an older than ideal age. I will return to this
point later when I explain why their sensitivity analysis is flawed. The mean age of fathers in
their sample in 1996 is reported to be 43.5 with a standard deviation of 6.3 years. This implies
that over the 5 years from 1996 through 2000, roughly 24 percent of the father-year observations

17

As discussed later, I use survey weights to address concerns about attrition.

14

used in constructing the average would be when fathers are over the age of 50. 18 This is an age
at which the transitory variance in income is quite high (Mazumder, 2005a). They also report
that prior to 1999 they record the income of non-filers to be zero. Therefore for about 3 percent
of observations in three of the five years used in their average they impute zeroes to the missing
observations. 19
For the children in the sample, the data limitations are even more severe. Chetty et al use
cohorts born between 1980 and 1982 and measure their income in 2011 and 2012 when they are
between the ages of 29 and 32. For this age range, simulations from Haider and Solon (2006)
suggest that there would be around a 20 percent bias in the estimated IGE compared to having
the full lifecycle. A further complication is that their measures are taken in 2011 and 2012 when
unemployment was relatively high and labor force participation quite low. They report that they
drop about 17 percent of observations from the poorest families due to their having zero income
over those 2 years. If their sample had covered 29 to 32 year olds in other time periods spanning
other periods of the business cycle, then using such a short window would have been somewhat
less of a concern.
Finally, there is a concern about whether administrative income data adequately captures
true income, particularly at the low and the high ends of the income distribution. For example, at
the lower end of the distribution, tax data could miss forms of income that go unreported to the
IRS. At the higher end, tax avoidance behavior could lead to an under-reporting of income.
Hokayem et al (2015) find that administrative tax data can do a worse job than survey data in

18

This example assumes the data is normally distributed. In 2000, more than a third of the observations would be
when fathers are over the age of 50.
19
See footnote 14 of Chetty et al. (2014). They show that measuring income over 1999 to 2003 has no effect on
their rank mobility estimates but they do not show how the IGE estimates change. Measuring income from 1999
to 2003 potentially worsens the attenuation bias in the IGE resulting from measuring fathers at late ages.

15

measuring poverty. Abowd and Stinson (2013) argue that it is preferable to treat both survey
data and administrative data as containing error. I also discuss below how a preferred concept of
family income that includes all resources available for consumption, including transfers and
income of other family members, would render tax data inadequate.
It is useful to visualize just how different the data structure of the Chetty et al sample is
from an ideal intergenerational sample. This is shown in Figure 1. For each of three samples
there are two columns of 31 cells representing the ages from 25 to 55 in each generation and we
assume that just one parent’s income can be measured. The degree of coverage over the life
course is represented by the extent to which the cells are colored. Panel A shows that if we
measured income in both generations using data spanning the entire life course for two
generations then all the cells in both generations would be colored in. Panel B contrasts this with
a typical parent-child observation in the Chetty et al sample. 20 This makes it clear just how small
a portion of the ideal lifecycle is covered. Just 6 percent of the child’s lifecycle and just 16
percent of the parent’s lifecycle would be covered. Panel C contrasts this with an example of a
result that will be produced with the PSID in the current study. There are many cohorts for
whom both child and parent income can be measured over several years centered around the age
of 40 when lifecycle bias is minimized. The figure presents an example of a 7-year average of
child income and a 15-year average of parent income. Such a sample would cover 23 percent of
the child’s lifecycle and 48 percent of the parent’s lifecycle.
To their credit, Chetty et al (2014) attempt to conduct some sensitivity checks to assess
these issues but their data, which only begins in 1996, are not well suited to doing effective
20

This example takes a child born in 1981 whose income is observed at age 30 and 31 during the years 2011 and
2012. I assume that the father was 29 years old when the child was born so that the father’s income is measured
between the ages of 44 and 48 during the years 1996 to 2000. This example closely tracks the mean ages of the
sample as reported by Chetty et al (2014).

16

robustness checks for the IGE measure. Below I will replicate their sensitivity checks with the
PSID data and show how the current IRS data limitations lead them to reach incorrect
conclusions regarding the sensitivity of their IGE estimates to these measurement problems.
Estimating the IGE when children have zero income
Chetty et al (2014) also argue that the IGE estimator is not robust to imputing years of
zero family income observed for individuals in the child generation. 21 They obtain an estimate
of 0.344 when they restrict the sample to those children with positive income in 2011 and 2012.
If they impute $1000 of income to these individuals then their IGE estimate rises to 0.413. If
they assign $1 then their IGE estimate rises to 0.618. There are three points worth making here.
First, the issue of having to deal with missing values is largely a consequence of the poor
lifecycle coverage of their sample. To see why this is the case, imagine a hypothetical researcher
in the year 2035 that attempts an intergenerational analysis for the 1980 birth cohort using the tax
data. In 2035 one would have complete information on family income throughout the ages of 25
to 55 and would not have to worry that some of these individuals reported no income in 2 of the
31 years of the lifecycle, during a period when unemployment was relatively high. There would
be as many as 29 other years of income data available to calculate lifetime income. In fact,
based on the prior literature, a researcher could probably obtain a fairly unbiased estimate of the
IGE for the 1980 birth cohort by the early 2020s if they could obtain even a few years of income
around the age of 40. In the PSID one can track cohorts born as far back as the 1950s who may
be observed over many years, at many ages, and at different stages of the business cycle.
Second, recent work by Mitnik et al (2015) point to an alternative approach for
estimating the IGE that is not sensitive to situations in which researchers may have only a short
21

17

span of data on children’s income and encounter cases of zero income. Specifically, they
estimate the elasticity of the expected income of children rather than the elasticity of the
geometric mean of income, which the literature has traditionally focused on. They argue that
this is the estimand that researchers should actually be interested in estimating. 22 They present
striking evidence that unlike the traditional IGE estimator, their alternative estimator of the IGE
is relatively immune to the treatment of missing income of children when income is measured
over only a short window of the lifecycle. However, it is unclear, and ultimately an empirical
question as to whether the Mitnik et al approach to estimating the IGE would yield substantially
different results from the traditional approach if one had access to the entire lifetime income
stream of children. In such a situation there would likely be very few cases of zeroes. This
would be a fruitful avenue for future research to explore.
A third remark relates to the concept of family income one wants to use. Economists
(e.g. Mulligan, 1997) have sometimes argued that an ideal measure of intergenerational mobility
would seek to measure lifetime consumption in both generations since consumption is perhaps
the measure closest to utility which is what economists like to focus on. In this case ideally we
would like to measure total family resources which includes income obtained from transfers and
from other family members. This is an example where survey data that has access to transfer
income would be preferable to tax data that may not. Including transfers may not only be a
preferred measure but may also help alleviate the problem of observing zero earnings or zero
income as is common in administrative data. It is also not obvious why the preferred measure of
family income would be one that only includes labor market earnings, transfers and capital

22

Chetty et al (2014) argue that the preferred estimator of Mitnik et al (2015) can be interpreted as a “dollarweighted” estimator of the IGE and the traditional IGE can be viewed as a “person-weighted” estimator and
suggest that each answers a different question.

18

income that happen to be reported on tax forms. This may help explain why Chetty et al
estimate an IGE of 0.452 when they limit their sample to individuals between the 10th and 90th
percentiles. The lack of coverage of all forms of transfer income may be less problematic for
this range since it excludes the bottom of the income distribution.
Estimating the IGE when parents have zero income
It is worth pointing out that the prior discussion is in many ways very distinct from the
problem of having a measure of zero income for parents. Chetty et al (2014) and Mitnik et al
both cite Dahl and Deliere (2008) in their discussions of the robustness of the IGE but Dahl and
Deliere actually confront an entirely different issue. Dahl and Deliere utilize social security
earnings data. For the years 1951 through 1983, they cannot distinguish between years of zero
earnings due to non-coverage in the SSA sector from “true” zeroes due to non-employment.
When they construct measures of parent average earnings over the ages of 20 to 55 and include
all years of earnings they obtain estimates of the intergenerational elasticity of only around 0.3
for men. However, their estimates may be including many years when actual earnings are
positive but are erroneously treated as zero because fathers were working in the non-covered
sector. Since this measurement error is on the right hand side it can severely attenuate the
estimate of the IGE.
They attempt to correct for this in some specifications by restricting the sample to parents
who were not in the armed forces or self-employed and who therefore would likely be in the
covered sector. But, importantly, the class of worker variable is only observed in one year, 1984,
which is at a relatively late point in the lifecycle for most of their sample of fathers. Therefore,
their long-term averages still include many years of zero earnings for workers who were actually
in the non-covered sector in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s but who had shifted to the covered sector
19

by 1984. Not surprisingly, using the class of worker status observed in 1984 to restrict the
sample still yields very low estimates of the IGE. However, when they restrict the number of
years of zero earnings in other very sensible ways to more directly address the issue, they obtain
estimates of around 0.5 to 0.6.

For example, when they use the log of average earnings

beginning with the first 5 consecutive years of positive earnings up to age 55 they obtain an
estimate of 0.498.
A clear advantage of the IRS tax data compared to the SSA data is that there is no
requirement of working in sectors covered by SSA. However, there may be concerns related to
whether individuals file their taxes and whether the IRS samples contain those who don’t file.
As mentioned earlier, Chetty et al assign zero income to parents who are in their sample but did
not file taxes in years prior to 1999. This can also lead to attenuation bias in estimating the IGE.
IV.

PSID Data
I restrict the analysis to father-son pairs as identified by the PSID’s Family Identification

Mapping System (FIMS) and use all years of available family income between the ages of 25
and 55 between the years of 1967 and 2010. 23 For the main analysis I consider a measure of
family income that excludes transfers and excludes income from household members that are not
the head of household or the spouse. This provides a measure of family income that is probably
most comparable to the concept used by Chetty et al (2014). In addition, I also constructed a
measure of family income that also includes transfers received by the household head or spouse,
but these results are not presented. 24 Finally, I construct a measure that uses only the labor
income of the father and son to be more comparable to papers that emphasize the IGE in labor
23

The focus on sons contrasts with Chetty et al (2014) who pool sons and daughters and Mitnik et al (2015) who
mainly produce separate estimates by gender.
24
These results were broadly similar to the baseline findings using the narrower measure of family income.

20

market income (e.g. Solon, 1992; Mazumder, 2005). Labor income is not simply earnings from
an employer but also incorporates self-employment. Observations marked as being generated by
a ‘major’ imputation are set to missing. Yearly income observations are deflated to real terms
using the CPI. In the PSID the household head is recorded as having zero labor income if their
income was actually zero or if their labor income is missing, so one cannot cleanly distinguish
true zeroes with labor income. All of the main analysis only uses years of non-zero income
when constructing time averages of income. When using family income, instances of reports of
zero income are relatively rare so the results are virtually immune to the inclusion of zeroes.
Therefore the concerns about the sensitivity of results around how to handle years of zero
income is effectively a non-issue when using family income.
The main analysis only uses the nationally representative portion of the PSID and
includes survey weights to account for attrition. All of the analysis was also done including the
SEO oversample of poorer households and includes survey weights. While the samples with the
SEO are larger and offer more precise estimates, there is some concern about the sampling
methodology (Lee and Solon, 2009). Finally all estimates are clustered on fathers.
The approach to estimation in this study is slightly different than in most previous PSID
studies of intergenerational mobility. Rather than relying on any one fixed length time average
for each generation and relying on parametric assumptions to deal with lifecycle bias (e.g. Lee
and Solon, 2009), instead I estimate an entire matrix of IGE’s for many combinations of lengths
of time averages that are all centered around age 40. I will present the full matrix of estimates
along with weighted averages across entire rows and columns representing the effects of a
particular length of the time average for a given generation. For example, rather than simply
comparing the IGE from using a ten-year average of fathers’ income to using a five year average
21

of fathers’ income for one particular time average of sons’ income, I can show how the estimates
are affected for every time average of sons’ income.
V.

Results

IGE Estimates
Table 1 shows the estimates of the IGE in family income that is conceptually similar to
that used by Chetty et al (2014). The first entry of the table at the upper left shows the estimate
if we use just one year of family income in the parent generation and one year of family income
for the sons when they are closest to age 40 and also are within the age-range constraints
described earlier. This estimate of the IGE is 0.414 with a standard error of 0.075 and utilizes a
sample of 1358. One point immediately worth noting is that this estimate which uses just a
single year of family income around the age 40 is higher than the 0.344 found by Chetty et al
(2014). Moving across the row, the estimates gradually include more years of income between
the ages of 35 and 45 for the sons. At the same time the sample size gradually diminishes as an
increasingly fewer number of sons have will income available for a higher length of required
years. For the most part the estimates don’t change much and most are in the range of 0.35 and
0.42. At the end of the row I display the weighted average across the columns, where the
estimates are weighted by the sample size. For the first row the weighted average is 0.381.
Moving down the rows for a given column, the estimates gradually increase the time
average used to measure family income in the parent generation and as a consequence also
reduces the sample size. For example, if we move down the first column and continue to just use
the sons’ income in one year measured closet to age 40 and now increase the time average of
parent income to 2 years, the estimate rises to 0.439 as the sample falls to 1317. Using a five
year average raises the estimate to 0.530 (N=1175). Increasing the time average to 10 years
22

increases the estimate to 0.580 (N=895). Using a 15 year average raises the estimate further to
0.680 (N=533). The weighted average for each row is displayed in the last column and the
weighted average for each column is displayed in the bottom row.
A few points are worth making. Since expanding the time average in either dimension
reduces the sample size it risks making the sample less representative. The implications on the
estimates, however, are quite different for whether we increase the time average for the sons’
generation or for the fathers’. For the parent generation, increasing the time average tends to
raise estimates. This is consistent with a story in which larger time averages reduce attenuation
bias stemming from mis-measurement of parent income (Solon, 1992; Mazumder, 2005). This
also accords with standard econometric theory concerning mis-measurement of the right hand
side variable.

On the other hand, econometric theory posits that mis-measurement in the

dependent variable typically should not cause attenuation bias. Indeed, increasing the time
average of sons’ family income has little effect. But crucially, this is because we have centered
the time average of family income in each generation so that the lifecycle bias which induces
“non-classical” measurement error in the dependent variable (Haider and Solon, 2006) may
already be accounted for.
By this reasoning one might consider the estimates in the first column to be the most
useful since they allow one to see how a reduction in measurement error in parent income affects
the estimates while simultaneously minimizing life cycle bias and keeping the sample as large as
possible. A more conservative view would be to use the weighted average in the final column
that takes into account the possible effects of incorporating more years of data on sons’ income
while also giving greater weight to estimates with larger samples. Figure 2 shows the pattern of
estimates from the two approaches as I gradually use longer time averages.
23

With either

approach, time averages of 10 to 15 years yield estimates of the IGE in family income that are
consistently greater than 0.6. Appendix Table 1 and Appendix Figure 1 show the analogous set
of estimates using larger samples that include the SEO oversample.
The key idea of the study is to see how these IGE estimates would compare to what one
would obtain by imposing the current data limitations of the IRS sample. To do this, one can use
the second column and fifth row of Table 1 as a baseline estimate. That estimate of 0.493 uses a
two year average of family income of sons centered around age 40 and a five year average of
parent income centered around age 40. If I now impose a sample restriction such that I use a two
year average of sons taken over the ages of 29-32 and use a five year average of parent income
centered around the age of 46 then the estimate I obtain is 0.282 (s.e. = 0.099). This is only 57
percent of the value when using similar time averages centered at age 40. Furthermore, if the
true IGE is actually 0.7, then it is only 40 percent of the true parameter. If I include the SEO
subsample then the estimate rises a bit to 0.325 (s.e. = 0.081). For that sample, the data
limitations yield estimates that are 62 percent of the comparable estimates when using time
averages centered at age 40. Neither of the two estimates are statistically different from the
Chetty et al estimate of 0.344. This suggests that it is the data limitations in the tax data that lead
Chetty et al to produce estimates that are vastly lower than what has been reported in most of the
previous literature.
Interestingly, Mitnik et al (2015) report a strikingly similar pattern of results. Their
baseline estimates use children’s income measured between the ages of 35 and 38 and 9 year
averages of parent income. Using a non-parametric approach on a sample that includes all
children, their estimates of the traditional IGE range from 0.55 to 0.74 depending on how they

24

impute the income of children who report no income. 25 When they move from this baseline
sample to one that mimics the sample used by Chetty et al (children between the ages of 29 and
32 and using a 5 year average of parent income), their estimate falls to 0.28. If they instead use
their preferred IGE estimator, then their main estimate is 0.50 and their estimate when
mimicking the sample used by Chetty et al is 0.37.
Table 2 shows a set of IGE estimates that only use the labor income of fathers and sons.
On the whole, the estimates in Table 2 are fairly similar to those in Table 1 as is shown in Figure
3 which plots the weighted average across the columns. For example, when using a 12-year
average of fathers’ income, the IGE when using labor income is 0.611 and when using family
income the estimate is 0.612.
These estimates are broadly similar and slightly higher than those found by Mazumder
(2005a) who used the labor market earnings of fathers and sons from social security earnings
data. Mazumder (2005a) relied on several data imputation approaches to deal with issues related
to social security coverage and topcoding. However, with the PSID, none of these kinds of
imputations are necessary. These findings, along with similar results in Mazumder (2005b),
Mazumder and Acosta (2014) and Mitnik et al (2015) which also do not require imputations,
suggest that the results of Mazumder (2005a) are likely not due to the use of imputations as
argued by Chetty et al (2014) but instead are due to the longer time averages available in the
SSA data and the PSID. This also suggests that Mazumder (2005a) may have been correct in
arguing that the use of imputations may not have imparted an upward bias. 26
Robustness Checks

25
26

See their Table 11.
Sees section 3 for a more detailed discussion of this issue.

25

A drawback of the PSID data is that there can be substantial attrition. One may be
concerned that the samples that use longer time averages of parent income could be very
different from the ones that use shorter time averages. Perhaps, it is the case that the higher
estimates that I attribute to using longer time averages in Table 1 are instead due to a change in
the composition of families.
To address this I conduct two robustness exercises. First, I use a set of fixed samples to
show how IGE estimates change as I increase the time average of parent income while holding
the composition of families constant. To narrow the focus of the exercise, I consider the case of
using 1 available year of income for sons when they are closest to the age of 40. 27 I then
consider, for example, the 1063 families where I have 7 years of available family income of
fathers and see how the estimates as I gradually increase the time average of parent income from
1 to 7 years. This is shown in column 3 of Table 3. If I use 1 year of parent income the IGE is
estimated to be 0.358. If I use a 3-year average the estimate rises to 0.446. If I use a 5-year
average the IGE rises further to 0.504 and rises to 0.529 when averaging all 7 years. In column
4, I show how the estimates change for the 895 families with 10 years of income and in column 5
I present the pattern of estimates for the 533 families with 15 years of income. Columns 1 and 2
consider the effects of time averaging for smaller time averages of 3 and 5 years where the
samples are even larger. In nearly all cases, the estimates rise monotonically as more years are
used to increase the time average. Mitnik et al (2015) present a similar set of exercises using
their IRS samples in their Appendix and show a similar pattern when they increase time averages
of parent income up to 9 years. This is comforting because one clear advantage of administrative
tax data is that attrition from a survey is not a concern.

27

These are the samples that are in column 1 of Table 1.

26

A second exercise directly examines the characteristics of families in which longer time
averages of parent income are available. I consider 7 characteristics of fathers: income, age;
education; percent black, percent white; percent married and percent ever divorced. 28 As before
I consider how these characteristics differ for the samples presented in column 1 of Table 1. The
results are shown in Appendix Table 2. The table shows for example, that the mean education
level of fathers in the sample of 533 families with 15 years of parent income is 13.0. This
compares to a mean of 12.9 years for fathers with 5 years of income. The lower panel of the
table shows that the difference is not statistically significant (p-value = 0.50). While the families
with longer time averages may be slightly more educated they are also more likely to be black
and more likely to be divorced, suggesting some evidence of negative selection. Overall, there is
no clear pattern of selection with respect to socioeconomic status.
If one compares the samples with 10 year averages to those with 1 or 5 years, there are no
statistically significant or economically meaningful differences in father characteristics. The fact
that the estimates of the IGE are already well above 0.5 even when using 10-year averages
suggests that the main points of the paper likely hold. In summary, there are no especially
striking patterns that suggest that the longer time averages are due to changing characteristics of
parents.
Despite these checks I would still be somewhat cautious in arguing that the considerably
smaller samples, with say 11 to 15 years of parent income, do not suffer from any concerns
related to selection. One concern is that if the attenuation bias with using short-term averages is
truly due to measurement error and serial correlation in transitory fluctuations as argued by
Mazumder (2005a), then one would not expect the IGE to increase nearly linearly with the length
28

I also consider mother’s education.

27

of the time average as Figure 1 shows, but instead, would exhibit a more concave pattern as the
simulation results in Mazumder (2005a) depict.

This is one argument in favor of using

administrative data where attrition is typically not an issue. Although the currently available US
tax data does not yet have a long enough panel length to resolve this issue, future studies using
administrative data in the US and other countries should continue to shed light on the nature of
the earnings process and what it might imply for IGE estimates using longer-time averages.
Sensitivity Checks in Chetty et al (2014)
Chetty et al (2014) argue that their national estimates of the IGE are unaffected by the
age at which children’s income is measured. They also argue that their estimates are unaffected
by the length of the time average used to measure parent income. They perform sensitivity
checks to demonstrate this empirically and present the results visually in figures. In this section I
describe why those sensitivity checks are flawed and show how one can demonstrate this using
the PSID. In short, their sensitivity checks introduce new attenuation bias from using parent
income at older ages. This bias appears to fully offset the reductions in attenuation bias that
would otherwise have been apparent when using older children or when extending the time
average of parent income.
They first discuss the sensitivity of the IGE to the age at which child income is measured,
Chetty et al claim that while there is some lifecycle bias early in the career that this stabilizes
once children have reached the age of around 30. They conduct an empirical exercise that is
shown in their Appendix Figure IIA.

They implement this sensitivity check by using an

additional tax dataset that includes much smaller intergenerational samples from the Statistics of
Income (SOI). With the SOI data they can examine the IGE between parents and children for
earlier birth cohorts going back to 1971. However, they continue to use family income in 2011
28

and 2012 for children and in 1996 to 2000 for the parents. This implies, for example, that when
they examine the 1971 cohort to measure the IGE for 41 year olds they are actually using parent
income that is measured when the child was between the ages of 25 to 29 and unlikely to be
living at home. Perhaps more importantly, this also requires that they use the income of fathers
when they are likely to be especially old. For example, the income of a father who was 28 when
his child was born in 1971 would be 53 to 57 years old when his income was measured in 1996
to 2000. Using parent income at such late ages when transitory fluctuations are a substantial part
of earnings variation can lead to substantial attenuation bias that could offset the reduction in
lifecycle bias from measuring child income at age 40 (Mazumder 2005a). Overall it could make
it appear as though there is no lifecycle bias when in fact it may actually be substantial.
With a long-running panel dataset like the PSID one can replicate this sensitivity check
but can also show how the results differ if one simultaneously keeps the age at which father’s
income is measured, constant. To implement this exercise, I first replicate the findings in Chetty
et al by gradually increasing the age at which sons’ income is measured from 22 to 41 while
simultaneously increasing the parent age range at which the five year average of parent income is
measured to match the analogous age range implied by the tax data. 29 I then fix this problem by
using a 5 year time average of parent income that is always centered at the age of 40 while
simultaneously raising the age of sons when their income is measured from 22 to 41.
Figure 4 shows the results of this exercise. The red line replicates the flawed sensitivity
check. Lifecycle bias appears to level off around the age of 30 and may even appear to decline
slightly in the late 30s. The green line demonstrates that this sensitivity check is flawed once
29

To fix ideas, for those sons who are aged 32, one would use the income of fathers when the child is between the
ages of 15 and 19 as in Chetty et al. For those who are 33 one would use the income of fathers when the child is
between 16 and 20 and so on.

29

you hold parent age constant around the age of 40. While both lines track each other reasonably
well before the age of 30, they start to diverge after the age of 32. This is precisely around the
time when the red line utilizes data on parents when the child is no longer in the home, when the
parents are entering their 50s and when their income becomes noisy. With the green line,
however, we continue to use centered time averages of parents around the age of 40 to eliminate
this downward bias. The bottom line is that there is in fact substantial lifecycle bias that cannot
be uncovered by the sensitivity checks in the Chetty et al version of the tax data because of
inherent data limitations.
There is also a second pertinent sensitivity analysis that Chetty et al present in their
Figure 3B. Here they consider how their results change when they increase the time average of
parent income. They do this by adding additional years beyond the 1996-2000 time frame and
showing that their rank-rank slope estimates do not increase, though they never show the results
of this exercise for the IGE. The key problem with this approach is that can only extend the
length of the time averages forward in time. This necessarily results in increasing the attenuation
bias from using later ages in the lifecycle of parents. This can again have an offsetting effect due
to attenuation bias. For example, the mean age of fathers in their sample in 2003 exceeds 50 so
once they start lengthening time averages to include data in 2003 and beyond, they are actually
including income observations containing a large transitory component. As before, this also
implies that they are actually utilizing many years of income when the child is likely no longer
living at home. With the PSID, one can avoid this pitfall. Specifically, one can increase the
length of the time average while still holding constant the mean age of fathers by using centered
time averages.

30

As before, I first use the PSID to replicate the results of the sensitivity check in Chetty at
al and then show that time averaging does in fact reduce the attenuation bias once one removes
the mechanical effect of increasing parent age. 30 The results are shown in Figure 5. First, I am
able to replicate the spirit of the finding in Chetty et al’s Figure 3B. The red line shows that as I
extend the time average of fathers’ income by using years when the fathers are getting older, I
find that the time averages appear to have no effect on increasing estimates of the IGE. The IGE
stays flat at first and then actually starts to decline when the time averages get very large.
However, when I use a centered time average of fathers’ income around the age of 40, a
lengthening of the time average generally leads to greater IGE estimates suggesting that larger
time averages of parent income do tend to reduce attenuation bias. It is worth noting here that
Mazumder (2005a) was able to use SSA data to extend his time averages of fathers earnings
backwards in time and also use centered time averages. Finally, Mitnik et al (2015) also show
that in their tax data that longer time averages of parent income and measuring child income at
later ages lead to higher IGE estimates.
Rank-Rank Slope Estimates
In this section, I present an analogous set of results for the rank-rank slope. For this
analysis I use the same measure of family income that is used to generate Table 1. The results
are shown in Table 4. With the rank-rank slope some new patterns emerge. First, it appears that
increasing the length of the time averages centered at the age of 40 for sons does appear to
increase the slope estimates. For example, looking over the first 10 rows, it appears that in

30

Specifically, I use just a 2 year average of sons’ income over the ages of 29 to 32 and then start with a single year
of fathers’ income that is measured when the son is 15 and then gradually add years of fathers’ income from
subsequent years. For a five year average, this uses the income of fathers when the son is between the ages of 15
and 19. This mimics the 1981 birth cohort in Chetty et al whose parent income is measured between 1996 and
2000. A ten year average then utilizes the income of fathers when the son is between the ages of 15 and 24.

31

nearly every case the slope estimates are higher when sons’ income is averaged over 8, 9 or 10
years rather than just 1 or 2 years. This was not the case with the IGE. In Table 1 it was
typically the reverse pattern. It is not obvious why this is the case but perhaps there is some
aspect of lifecycle bias that is more pronounced when using ranks than when using the IGE.
This may be a fruitful issue for future research to investigate.
Second, the effect of using longer time averages of parent income is much more muted
with the rank-rank slope than with the IGE. In table 1, the weighted average of the IGE across
all the rows goes from around 0.38 when using a single year of family income to about 0.66
when using 15 year averages of family income –a 72 percent increase. The analogous increase
in the rank-rank slope is a rise from 0.31 to 0.40 or just a 29 percent increase. A takeaway from
Table 3 is that the rank-rank slope may be around 0.4 or higher rather than the 0.34 reported by
Chetty et al. If we do the same exercise of imposing the limitations of the tax data on our PSID
sample, the estimate drops from 0.33 when using centered time averages (two years of sons and
five years for fathers) to 0.28 when using sons between the ages of 29 and 32 and fathers
between the ages of 44 and 48. Again, these results suggest that even the rank-rank slope
estimates using the tax data are likely attenuated, albeit to a lesser degree than the substantial
attenuation with the IGE estimates. These results are also very similar if one includes the SEO
oversample of poorer households or just uses labor income of fathers and sons (results available
upon request).
In Figures 6 and 7 I return to sensitivity analysis exercises from Chetty et al (2014) in the
context of the rank-rank slope and replicate those exercises with the PSID, first allowing father’s
age to shift higher mechanically but then correcting for this by holding father’s age constant
using centered time averages around the age of 40. Figure 6 doesn’t point to a very clean story.
32

In this case the red line is often larger than the green line suggesting that estimates are often
slightly lower when using the centered time averages.

On the other hand both lines, but

especially the green one, appear to trend higher over the course of the 30s suggesting that
perhaps life-cycle bias does not taper off around age 30. Figure 7 is also interesting. The red
line is flat to declining and very similar to what Chetty et al find but has the problem of
conflating two different biases. The green line, which fixes the mechanical increase in fathers’
age when taking longer time averages does show evidence of larger estimates but only when the
time averages are very long. Overall, estimates of the rank-rank slope are also likely biased
down due the limitations of the tax data but to a much lesser extent than the IGE.
VI.

Conclusion
The literature on intergenerational mobility over the past few decades has shown how

attenuation bias and lifecycle bias can substantially affect estimates of the intergenerational
elasticity (IGE). Most previous estimates of the IGE in family income in the U.S. are around 0.5.
Utilizing PSID data I generate the first estimates of the IGE in the US using long time averages
of parent income and using income centered at age 40 in both generations. I find that the IGE for
sons is likely greater than 0.6 with respect to both family income and labor market earnings
suggesting less mobility than most previous estimates and similar to estimates in Mazumder
(2005a).
In contrast, using very large samples of tax records that begin in 1996, Chetty et al (2014)
estimate that the IGE is actually much lower at 0.344. Further they claim that these estimates are
not subject to attenuation bias or lifecycle bias. If accurate, this finding is important because it
implies that income gaps between families in America will dissipate relatively quickly over time.
It is important to understand whether the evidence of greater mobility from their tax data sample
33

is accurate or spurious. Revisiting the results from this study may also hold more general lessons
for researchers who use administrative data to estimate intergenerational mobility.
I first describe the fundamental data limitations of using intergenerational samples based
on US tax data that only begin in 1996. The key point is that the panel length is currently too
short to do a good job overcoming the issues concerning attenuation bias and lifecycle bias. I
demonstrate that a long-lived survey panel such as the PSID that may only have a few thousand
families is actually more useful for estimating the national IGE than having millions of tax
records if the data are limited in their ability to cover long stretches of the life course.
Specifically, I show that when I use the PSID but impose the same age structure and use the
shorter time averages of parent income to mimic Chetty et al, that I obtain similar IGE estimates
of around 0.3. I also demonstrate that the sensitivity checks used by Chetty et al to address
concerns about 1) the age at which sons’ income is measured, and 2) the length of time averages
of parent income, are flawed because they impose an offsetting attenuation bias by increasing the
age at which parent income is measured. Correcting for this confounding, I show that the
lifecycle bias and attenuation bias almost surely exist in the tax data when estimating the IGE.
Further confirmation of this is provided by Mitnik et al (2015) who find evidence of these
biases in a different IRS sample that extends further back in time and enables an analysis of older
children and the use of longer time averages of parent income. The fact that several other papers
that also use administrative data in other countries (Nilsen et al, 2012; Gregg et al, 2013 and
Nybom and Stuhler, 2015) also show that these biases matter, suggest that Chetty et al’s findings
are more the exception than the rule.
On the other hand, the results with the PSID with respect to the rank-rank slope suggest
that these biases are much smaller and that the rank-rank slope is relatively more robust (though
34

not entirely immune) from these measurement concerns. It is important, however, to remember
that the IGE is conceptually different from the rank-rank slope and may continue to be of
substantial value to researchers and policy-makers especially in an era of rising inequality when
income gaps in society may be expanding. In that context, focusing only on positional mobility
solely because measurement is easier, may not be appropriate.
Another point worth emphasizing is that survey data may be advantageous for measuring
certain sources of income that simply may not be tracked in tax records. These sources of
income may provide better measures of the true resources available to families, especially for
those at the low end of the income distribution. Given the growing use of administrative data
and the excitement over new sources of such data, this characteristic of survey data may start to
become overlooked.

This is an argument for continuing to produce estimates of

intergenerational mobility using survey data despite their smaller sample sizes, at least as a
complement to using administrative data.
Finally, it is important to make clear that Chetty et al (2014) makes a notable contribution
to the literature by demonstrating that there may be large geographic differences in
intergenerational mobility across the U.S. It is likely that these large geographic differences will
remain even after correcting for the biases in the tax data. Nevertheless, it may be useful for
future research to more directly examine this issue and verify that the central findings in their
paper are robust to these biases.

35

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38

Table 1: Estimates of the father-son IGE in family income
Time Average of Sons' Income (years)
Time Avg.
Fath. Inc.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

wgt avg.

1
0.414

2
0.372

3
0.405

4
0.375

5
0.397

6
0.361

7
0.317

8
0.315

9
0.354

10
0.415

Wgt.
Avg.
0.381

(0.075)

(0.067)

(0.069)

(0.068)

(0.064)

(0.070)

(0.063)

(0.068)

(0.080)

(0.091)

1358
0.439

1184
0.420

1050
0.434

932
0.402

786
0.429

595
0.443

440
0.391

351
0.379

267
0.419

183
0.453

0.423

(0.066)

(0.059)

(0.062)

(0.062)

(0.068)

(0.088)

(0.067)

(0.069)

(0.082)

(0.089)

1317
0.478

1145
0.445

1015
0.450

901
0.414

758
0.440

572
0.440

419
0.401

331
0.380

251
0.416

170
0.449

0.441

(0.067)

(0.060)

(0.064)

(0.064)

(0.071)

(0.088)

(0.062)

(0.066)

(0.078)

(0.088)

1268
0.478

1099
0.455

970
0.467

862
0.435

719
0.453

537
0.463

389
0.419

306
0.388

230
0.431

154
0.422

0.453

(0.068)

(0.061)

(0.069)

(0.069)

(0.079)

(0.105)

(0.063)

(0.067)

(0.085)

(0.091)

1216
0.530

1051
0.493

926
0.500

819
0.468

678
0.479

497
0.477

354
0.428

273
0.398

203
0.441

133
0.454

0.485

(0.071)

(0.065)

(0.075)

(0.076)

(0.088)

(0.113)

(0.065)

(0.069)

(0.090)

(0.098)

1175
0.517

1015
0.482

892
0.492

788
0.458

649
0.473

471
0.476

332
0.420

255
0.389

188
0.434

123
0.452

0.477

(0.071)

(0.066)

(0.077)

(0.078)

(0.091)

(0.120)

(0.064)

(0.067)

(0.091)

(0.092)

1120
0.529

966
0.485

843
0.492

741
0.459

606
0.464

431
0.462

299
0.379

228
0.369

165
0.399

105
0.402

0.474

(0.077)

(0.073)

(0.086)

(0.089)

(0.105)

(0.144)

(0.065)

(0.078)

(0.109)

(0.104)

1063
0.552

915
0.518

795
0.546

696
0.521

564
0.545

396
0.595

271
0.368

202
0.345

143
0.430

87
0.468

0.523

(0.086)

(0.082)

(0.091)

(0.096)

(0.110)

(0.166)

(0.092)

(0.114)

(0.166)

(0.156)

1005
0.573

863
0.537

747
0.558

648
0.536

520
0.560

354
0.629

232
0.435

168
0.391

114
0.494

67
0.624

0.548

(0.090)

(0.087)

(0.096)

(0.101)

(0.115)

(0.179)

(0.090)

(0.117)

(0.183)

(0.159)

956
0.580

818
0.529

710
0.545

614
0.521

488
0.550

326
0.633

208
0.421

147
0.388

97
0.502

54
0.698

0.544

(0.095)

(0.092)

(0.101)

(0.106)

(0.124)

(0.197)

(0.092)

(0.124)

(0.201)

(0.192)

895
0.630

766
0.567

660
0.590

569
0.576

449
0.602

298
0.691

185
0.460

129
0.380

83
0.461

45
0.650

0.588

(0.099)

(0.099)

(0.107)

(0.113)

(0.134)

(0.220)

(0.093)

(0.140)

(0.234)

(0.245)

818
0.648

696
0.592

595
0.623

510
0.589

399
0.624

255
0.747

149
0.474

98
0.386

59
0.400

31
0.604

0.612

(0.109)

(0.108)

(0.117)

(0.123)

(0.151)

(0.258)

(0.119)

(0.164)

(0.247)

(0.271)

743
0.667

633
0.612

541
0.649

465
0.625

358
0.605

224
0.533

121
0.462

78
0.287

46
0.395

24
0.363

0.612

(0.122)

(0.107)

(0.110)

(0.113)

(0.114)

(0.117)

(0.155)

(0.215)

(0.301)

(0.164)

656
0.714

554
0.692

470
0.714

399
0.681

307
0.659

184
0.629

96
0.511

57
0.457

31
0.986

13
0.761

0.685
0.656

(0.129)

(0.104)

(0.116)

(0.120)

(0.122)

(0.115)

(0.182)

(0.311)

(0.411)

(0.368)

590
0.680

495
0.664

415
0.662

349
0.616

263
0.651

146
0.597

70
0.532

36
0.576

15
1.527

7
0.954

(0.134)

(0.099)

(0.109)

(0.108)

(0.123)

(0.129)

(0.216)

(0.393)

(0.258)

(0.700)

533

448

374

309

228

120

54

24

11

6

0.539

0.501

0.517

0.485

0.501

0.510

0.405

0.374

0.432

0.469

39

Table 2: Estimates of the father-son IGE in labor income
Time Average of Sons' Income (years)
Time Avg.
Fath. Inc.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

wgt avg.

1
0.299

2
0.308

3
0.308

4
0.335

5
0.358

6
0.333

7
0.373

8
0.395

9
0.384

10
0.359

Wgt.
Avg.
0.359

(0.072)

(0.069)

(0.063)

(0.064)

(0.065)

(0.066)

(0.069)

(0.070)

(0.085)

(0.084)

955
0.412

824
0.412

696
0.407

581
0.405

466
0.407

360
0.369

264
0.439

202
0.422

156
0.427

104
0.412

0.383

(0.063)

(0.061)

(0.061)

(0.065)

(0.074)

(0.075)

(0.059)

(0.059)

(0.077)

(0.081)

928
0.436

799
0.422

674
0.401

562
0.395

450
0.393

345
0.368

250
0.440

191
0.430

147
0.441

96
0.421

0.473

(0.061)

(0.061)

(0.059)

(0.064)

(0.073)

(0.076)

(0.056)

(0.055)

(0.072)

(0.080)

900
0.420

773
0.412

649
0.408

539
0.392

431
0.387

329
0.359

236
0.435

180
0.404

137
0.409

88
0.395

0.491

(0.064)

(0.063)

(0.062)

(0.067)

(0.076)

(0.077)

(0.058)

(0.058)

(0.073)

(0.082)

864
0.472

741
0.462

622
0.440

514
0.416

411
0.397

310
0.367

218
0.445

163
0.416

123
0.437

80
0.437

0.516

(0.069)

(0.066)

(0.067)

(0.071)

(0.080)

(0.082)

(0.059)

(0.059)

(0.077)

(0.091)

841
0.485

720
0.473

609
0.450

502
0.432

401
0.402

300
0.360

209
0.455

155
0.434

116
0.471

76
0.488

0.490

(0.071)

(0.068)

(0.068)

(0.074)

(0.083)

(0.082)

(0.059)

(0.061)

(0.084)

(0.102)

797
0.486

683
0.468

574
0.440

469
0.420

371
0.385

274
0.332

190
0.441

139
0.401

101
0.432

63
0.430

0.497

(0.077)

(0.074)

(0.075)

(0.082)

(0.091)

(0.087)

(0.073)

(0.080)

(0.104)

(0.106)

760
0.510

652
0.487

546
0.473

445
0.459

349
0.451

255
0.407

174
0.414

123
0.352

88
0.382

52
0.409

0.559

(0.085)

(0.081)

(0.079)

(0.087)

(0.094)

(0.080)

(0.092)

(0.108)

(0.135)

(0.117)

725
0.511

622
0.476

518
0.461

419
0.445

327
0.452

235
0.408

158
0.427

110
0.356

80
0.392

45
0.406

0.583

(0.086)

(0.081)

(0.079)

(0.088)

(0.094)

(0.080)

(0.092)

(0.109)

(0.136)

(0.122)

699
0.513

597
0.474

500
0.468

404
0.461

314
0.475

225
0.426

149
0.446

103
0.413

73
0.443

41
0.516

0.593

(0.088)

(0.084)

(0.081)

(0.092)

(0.102)

(0.085)

(0.101)

(0.122)

(0.161)

(0.144)

657
0.578

561
0.503

470
0.491

377
0.494

290
0.528

203
0.429

130
0.461

89
0.437

62
0.483

34
0.526

0.616

(0.093)

(0.091)

(0.087)

(0.096)

(0.106)

(0.092)

(0.116)

(0.143)

(0.203)

(0.186)

597
0.596

512
0.506

425
0.526

340
0.496

255
0.565

176
0.413

107
0.427

69
0.376

48
0.346

24
0.391

0.611

(0.102)

(0.108)

(0.105)

(0.113)

(0.131)

(0.118)

(0.158)

(0.158)

(0.233)

(0.157)

539
0.690

461
0.589

380
0.628

302
0.636

226
0.701

151
0.551

85
0.494

53
0.556

34
0.790

15
0.323

0.615

(0.111)

(0.114)

(0.112)

(0.127)

(0.153)

(0.143)

(0.176)

(0.208)

(0.316)

(0.323)

477
0.744

401
0.651

327
0.676

254
0.715

185
0.793

118
0.699

66
0.638

38
0.695

22
1.526

7
5.971

0.702
0.713

(0.116)

(0.122)

(0.119)

(0.138)

(0.161)

(0.158)

(0.216)

(0.266)

(0.259)

(0.916)

427
0.751

356
0.623

285
0.649

218
0.652

161
0.719

96
0.641

48
0.547

25
0.659

10
1.335

4
4.240

(0.122)

(0.127)

(0.125)

(0.138)

(0.163)

(0.179)

(0.266)

(0.282)

(0.253)

(0.000)

386

319

251

189

135

78

35

18

7

3

0.574

0.517

0.458

0.469

0.504

0.471

0.519

0.535

0.564

0.592

40

Table 3: Estimates of the father-son IGE in family income using fixed samples

Time Avg.
Father Inc.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
13
15
N

Samples use sons with 1 year of income
and fathers with the following available years of income
3
5
7
10
15
0.397
0.393
0.358
0.388
0.291
(0.070)
(0.074)
(0.078)
(0.100)
(0.131)
0.438
0.430
0.401
0.429
0.366
(0.068)
(0.071)
(0.076)
(0.097)
(0.122)
0.478
0.473
0.446
0.497
0.453
(0.067)
(0.070)
(0.075)
(0.095)
(0.124)
0.484
0.460
0.522
0.479
(0.069)
(0.072)
(0.091)
(0.114)
0.530
0.504
0.579
0.568
(0.071)
(0.075)
(0.094)
(0.121)
0.515
0.581
0.580
(0.075)
(0.092)
(0.118)
0.529
0.595
0.622
(0.077)
(0.094)
(0.120)
0.583
0.619
(0.094)
(0.119)
0.584
0.635
(0.095)
(0.123)
0.580
0.643
(0.095)
(0.122)
0.662
(0.132)
0.680
(0.134)
1268
1175
1063
895
533

41

Table 4: Estimates of the father-son rank-rank slope in family income
Time Average of Sons' Income (years)
Time Avg.
Fath. Inc.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

wgt avg.

1
0.282

2
0.304

3
0.326

4
0.309

5
0.333

6
0.322

7
0.295

8
0.290

9
0.307

10
0.423

Wgt.
Avg.
0.310

(0.032)

(0.036)

(0.039)

(0.040)

(0.043)

(0.050)

(0.059)

(0.065)

(0.071)

(0.080)

1358
0.290

1184
0.312

1050
0.341

932
0.329

786
0.362

595
0.376

440
0.352

351
0.339

267
0.356

183
0.448

0.334

(0.032)

(0.035)

(0.038)

(0.040)

(0.043)

(0.050)

(0.059)

(0.065)

(0.073)

(0.083)

1317
0.296

1145
0.317

1015
0.341

901
0.328

758
0.362

572
0.379

419
0.373

331
0.352

251
0.375

170
0.451

0.338

(0.032)

(0.035)

(0.039)

(0.041)

(0.043)

(0.049)

(0.055)

(0.065)

(0.072)

(0.086)

1268
0.296

1099
0.320

970
0.347

862
0.333

719
0.366

537
0.391

389
0.396

306
0.363

230
0.389

154
0.435

0.343

(0.032)

(0.036)

(0.039)

(0.041)

(0.044)

(0.050)

(0.055)

(0.067)

(0.078)

(0.096)

1216
0.309

1051
0.333

926
0.362

819
0.348

678
0.378

497
0.399

354
0.413

273
0.374

203
0.402

133
0.482

0.357

(0.032)

(0.036)

(0.040)

(0.042)

(0.045)

(0.052)

(0.058)

(0.069)

(0.083)

(0.097)

1175
0.299

1015
0.319

892
0.348

788
0.333

649
0.362

471
0.385

332
0.404

255
0.365

188
0.399

123
0.504

0.344

(0.034)

(0.037)

(0.042)

(0.044)

(0.047)

(0.054)

(0.063)

(0.072)

(0.088)

(0.095)

1120
0.283

966
0.302

843
0.328

741
0.311

606
0.336

431
0.350

299
0.370

228
0.316

165
0.339

105
0.436

0.318

(0.035)

(0.039)

(0.044)

(0.046)

(0.049)

(0.057)

(0.067)

(0.076)

(0.095)

(0.104)

1063
0.282

915
0.303

795
0.336

696
0.321

564
0.348

396
0.362

271
0.332

202
0.279

143
0.280

87
0.396

0.317

(0.037)

(0.042)

(0.046)

(0.049)

(0.052)

(0.062)

(0.075)

(0.088)

(0.112)

(0.123)

1005
0.292

863
0.309

747
0.342

648
0.333

520
0.365

354
0.394

232
0.403

168
0.327

114
0.318

67
0.493

0.334

(0.038)

(0.043)

(0.048)

(0.050)

(0.053)

(0.062)

(0.071)

(0.091)

(0.125)

(0.113)

956
0.287

818
0.304

710
0.330

614
0.319

488
0.352

326
0.379

208
0.397

147
0.330

97
0.314

54
0.539

0.325

(0.039)

(0.044)

(0.049)

(0.051)

(0.054)

(0.064)

(0.074)

(0.098)

(0.138)

(0.134)

895
0.299

766
0.315

660
0.345

569
0.338

449
0.364

298
0.394

185
0.413

129
0.315

83
0.267

45
0.518

0.336

(0.040)

(0.046)

(0.051)

(0.054)

(0.057)

(0.069)

(0.080)

(0.112)

(0.162)

(0.169)

818
0.310

696
0.326

595
0.354

510
0.336

399
0.363

255
0.386

149
0.390

98
0.303

59
0.236

31
0.587

0.339

(0.042)

(0.049)

(0.054)

(0.057)

(0.062)

(0.077)

(0.093)

(0.125)

(0.179)

(0.196)

743
0.335

633
0.355

541
0.392

465
0.384

358
0.385

224
0.357

121
0.311

78
0.133

46
0.076

24
0.264

0.354

(0.046)

(0.051)

(0.055)

(0.057)

(0.065)

(0.088)

(0.118)

(0.162)

(0.232)

(0.295)

656
0.356

554
0.391

470
0.433

399
0.428

307
0.432

184
0.445

96
0.400

57
0.322

31
0.446

13
0.618

0.403
0.401

(0.048)

(0.050)

(0.055)

(0.057)

(0.066)

(0.088)

(0.127)

(0.191)

(0.285)

(0.244)

590
0.350

495
0.382

415
0.428

349
0.426

263
0.447

146
0.436

70
0.418

36
0.399

15
0.635

7
0.423

(0.050)

(0.051)

(0.057)

(0.057)

(0.068)

(0.095)

(0.137)

(0.242)

(0.231)

(0.382)

533

448

374

309

228

120

54

24

11

6

0.300

0.321

0.350

0.337

0.364

0.377

0.371

0.329

0.346

0.457

42

Figure 1: Comparison of life cycle coverage across intergenerational Samples

A. Ideal
Parent

55
54
53
52
51
50
49
48
47
46
45
44
43
42
41
40
39
38
37
36
35
34
33
32
31
30
29
28
27
26
25

Child

55
54
53
52
51
50
49
48
47
46
45
44
43
42
41
40
39
38
37
36
35
34
33
32
31
30
29
28
27
26
25

B. Chetty et al (2014)
Parent
Child
55
54
53
52
51
50
49
48
47
46
45
44
43
42
41
40
39
38
37
36
35
34
33
32
31
30
29
28
27
26
25

55
54
53
52
51
50
49
48
47
46
45
44
43
42
41
40
39
38
37
36
35
34
33
32
31
30
29
28
27
26
25

43

C. PSID
Parent

55
54
53
52
51
50
49
48
47
46
45
44
43
42
41
40
39
38
37
36
35
34
33
32
31
30
29
28
27
26
25

Child

55
54
53
52
51
50
49
48
47
46
45
44
43
42
41
40
39
38
37
36
35
34
33
32
31
30
29
28
27
26
25

Figure 2: Effects of time averaging on father-son IGE in family income
0.8
0.7
0.6

IGE

0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

13

14

15

Length of Time Average of Father's Income
Weighted Average

One year of Sons' Income

Figure 3: Father-son IGE in labor income vs family income
0.8
0.7
0.6

IGE

0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Length of Time Average of Father's Income
Family Income

Labor Income

44

12

Figure 4: Re-examining the Sensitivity of the IGE to Son's Age
1
0.9
0.8
0.7

IGE

0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
Age of Son
Replicating the Chetty et al Approach

Fixing the Sensitivity Check

Figure 5: Re-examining the Sensitivity of the IGE to longer time
averages of parent income
0.7
0.6
0.5

IGE

0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Length of Time Average of Father's Income
Replicating the Chetty et al Approach

Fixing the Sensitivity Check

45

Figure 6: Re-examining the Sensitivity of the Rank-rank Slope to Son's
Age
0.45
0.4
0.35

IGE

0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
Age of Son
Replicating the Chetty et al Approach

Fixing the Sensitivity Check

Figure 7: Re-examining the Sensitivity of the rank-rank Slope to longer
time averages of parent income
0.45
0.4
0.35

IGE

0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Length of Time Average of Father's Income
Replicating the Chetty et al Approach

Fixing the Sensitivity Check

46

Appendix Table 1: Estimates of the father-son IGE in family income using SEO subsample
Time Average of Sons' Income (years)
Time Avg.
Fath. Inc.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

wgt avg.

1
0.451

2
0.403

3
0.434

4
0.414

5
0.426

6
0.393

7
0.357

8
0.363

9
0.383

10
0.401

Wgt.
Avg.
0.415

(0.054)

(0.048)

(0.049)

(0.051)

(0.047)

(0.050)

(0.047)

(0.054)

(0.066)

(0.077)

2133
0.485

1842
0.450

1611
0.468

1400
0.438

1158
0.457

867
0.451

623
0.406

490
0.402

364
0.418

251
0.430

0.453

(0.053)

(0.045)

(0.047)

(0.049)

(0.052)

(0.061)

(0.048)

(0.053)

(0.063)

(0.069)

2062
0.526

1774
0.476

1550
0.491

1345
0.457

1109
0.476

828
0.473

590
0.439

460
0.428

340
0.446

234
0.461

0.480

(0.056)

(0.049)

(0.054)

(0.053)

(0.059)

(0.068)

(0.051)

(0.054)

(0.065)

(0.074)

1989
0.531

1706
0.487

1483
0.508

1287
0.476

1054
0.487

780
0.493

548
0.449

427
0.435

313
0.464

213
0.443

0.492

(0.058)

(0.051)

(0.058)

(0.059)

(0.066)

(0.080)

(0.052)

(0.056)

(0.072)

(0.079)

1865
0.586

1594
0.526

1389
0.544

1200
0.510

975
0.514

709
0.508

491
0.457

379
0.446

278
0.482

186
0.483

0.527

(0.062)

(0.056)

(0.066)

(0.067)

(0.076)

(0.092)

(0.058)

(0.062)

(0.082)

(0.093)

1780
0.575

1519
0.515

1320
0.535

1137
0.499

917
0.506

661
0.503

452
0.437

346
0.425

253
0.476

167
0.481

0.518

(0.063)

(0.056)

(0.068)

(0.069)

(0.079)

(0.097)

(0.057)

(0.062)

(0.086)

(0.094)

1677
0.593

1429
0.528

1235
0.548

1057
0.514

848
0.516

597
0.513

398
0.420

300
0.418

215
0.446

137
0.428

0.528

(0.067)

(0.063)

(0.076)

(0.079)

(0.093)

(0.119)

(0.060)

(0.071)

(0.099)

(0.102)

1579
0.595

1343
0.544

1155
0.576

984
0.546

783
0.554

543
0.587

357
0.422

263
0.411

186
0.480

115
0.514

0.553

(0.073)

(0.069)

(0.077)

(0.081)

(0.090)

(0.125)

(0.079)

(0.097)

(0.137)

(0.136)

1490
0.616

1266
0.560

1087
0.588

918
0.560

724
0.571

490
0.622

313
0.479

225
0.461

154
0.546

95
0.660

0.577

(0.077)

(0.073)

(0.081)

(0.085)

(0.094)

(0.135)

(0.077)

(0.102)

(0.153)

(0.140)

1405
0.633

1190
0.558

1025
0.587

862
0.555

674
0.575

447
0.645

276
0.476

195
0.451

129
0.547

74
0.691

0.582

(0.082)

(0.079)

(0.087)

(0.092)

(0.105)

(0.157)

(0.086)

(0.109)

(0.170)

(0.155)

1321
0.674

1123
0.584

961
0.618

803
0.587

623
0.599

410
0.669

245
0.471

172
0.385

112
0.470

63
0.606

0.608

(0.087)

(0.086)

(0.093)

(0.099)

(0.114)

(0.179)

(0.084)

(0.119)

(0.195)

(0.183)

1182
0.700

1003
0.610

849
0.650

703
0.601

540
0.620

342
0.720

194
0.482

130
0.381

81
0.415

44
0.617

0.633

(0.097)

(0.095)

(0.103)

(0.110)

(0.131)

(0.214)

(0.108)

(0.143)

(0.215)

(0.226)

1068
0.714

903
0.619

764
0.656

632
0.621

478
0.598

297
0.526

158
0.454

103
0.291

63
0.392

34
0.389

0.625

(0.111)

(0.097)

(0.099)

(0.104)

(0.104)

(0.106)

(0.144)

(0.187)

(0.251)

(0.161)

942
0.769

794
0.698

667
0.721

546
0.678

414
0.651

248
0.616

126
0.507

78
0.436

45
0.909

21
0.859

0.700
0.682

(0.118)

(0.094)

(0.106)

(0.112)

(0.112)

(0.104)

(0.170)

(0.274)

(0.354)

(0.353)

831
0.752

694
0.675

581
0.677

471
0.626

350
0.653

193
0.598

88
0.546

48
0.569

21
1.318

8
1.094

(0.123)

(0.090)

(0.099)

(0.100)

(0.112)

(0.114)

(0.200)

(0.335)

(0.334)

(0.642)

745

624

521

419

304

163

70

34

16

7

0.587

0.526

0.549

0.515

0.522

0.524

0.435

0.415

0.461

0.479

47

Appendix Table 2: Summary statistics of fathers by available years of income

1

N
1358

2

1317

3

1268

4

1216

5

1175

6

1120

7

1063

8

1005

9

956

10

895

11

818

12

743

13

656

14

590

15

533

5 v. 10 T-Stat
P-Val
5 v. 15 T-Stat
P-Val

Father
Mother
Income ($) Age Education Education Black
41.6
12.9
12.2
5.1%
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
41.9
12.9
12.2
5.1%
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
79233
41.5
12.9
12.2
5.1%
(1601)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
79805
41.7
12.9
12.3
5.3%
(1565)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
79477
41.4
12.9
12.3
5.2%
(1520)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
80877
41.6
12.9
12.3
5.3%
(1630)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
80962
41.3
12.9
12.3
5.2%
(1659)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
81612
41.5
12.9
12.3
5.5%
(1675)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
81175
41.2
12.9
12.3
5.4%
(1682)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
82609
41.4
12.9
12.4
5.1%
(1744)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
82650
40.9
12.9
12.5
5.3%
(1780)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
82005
41.0
13.0
12.5
5.2%
(1823)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
81503
40.6
13.0
12.5
5.2%
(1909)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
81444
40.7
13.0
12.5
5.7%
(2012)
(0.0)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
82272
40.3
13.0
12.5
5.9%
(2131)
(0.0)
(0.1)
(0.1)
(0.01)
Two-Sample Test in Difference of Means
-1.35
0.38
-0.32
-0.45
0.10
0.18
0.71
0.75
0.65
0.92
-1.07
13.49
-0.68
-1.64
-0.56
0.29
0.00
0.50
0.10
0.58

48

White
94.1%
(0.01)
94.1%
(0.01)
94.2%
(0.01)
94.0%
(0.01)
94.0%
(0.01)
94.0%
(0.01)
94.0%
(0.01)
93.7%
(0.01)
93.8%
(0.01)
94.0%
(0.01)
93.7%
(0.01)
93.8%
(0.01)
93.7%
(0.01)
93.1%
(0.01)
92.7%
(0.01)

Married
97.2%
(0.01)
97.2%
(0.01)
97.2%
(0.01)
97.2%
(0.01)
97.2%
(0.01)
97.2%
(0.01)
97.2%
(0.01)
97.3%
(0.01)
97.4%
(0.01)
97.3%
(0.01)
97.1%
(0.01)
96.8%
(0.01)
96.4%
(0.01)
96.1%
(0.01)
95.9%
(0.01)

Ever
Divorced
24.0%
(0.01)
24.5%
(0.01)
25.1%
(0.01)
25.9%
(0.01)
26.3%
(0.01)
26.5%
(0.01)
26.9%
(0.01)
27.5%
(0.01)
27.5%
(0.01)
27.9%
(0.02)
29.1%
(0.02)
29.0%
(0.02)
30.0%
(0.02)
31.4%
(0.02)
32.5%
(0.02)

0.03
0.98
0.98
0.33

-0.12
0.91
1.34
0.18

-0.80
0.42
-2.57
0.01

Appendix Figure 1: Effects of time averaging on father-son IGE in family
income including SEO sample
0.9
0.8
0.7

IGE

0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Length of Time Average of Father's Income
Weighted Average

One year of Sons' Income

49

12

13

14

15

Working Paper Series
A series of research studies on regional economic issues relating to the Seventh Federal
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6