Trends in Intergenerational Income Mobility

Previous studies of recent U.S. trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results, partly because of large sampling errors. By making more efficient use of the available information in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we generate more reliable estimates of the recent time series variation in intergenerational mobility. Our results, which pertain to the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975, do not reveal major changes in intergenerational mobility.