Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility

Chetty, Raj; Hendren, Nathaniel; Kline, Patrick; Saez, Emmanuel; Turner, Nicholas

doi:10.1257/aer.104.5.141

American Economic Review

2014

DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.5.141

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Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility

Raj Chetty

¹

,

Nathaniel Hendren

²

,

Patrick Kline

³

et al.

Abstract: We present new evidence on trends in intergenerational mobility in the United States using administrative earnings records. We find that percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extremely stable for the 1971-1993 birth cohorts. For children born between 1971 and 1986, we measure intergenerational mobility based on the correlation between parent and child income percentile ranks. For more recent cohorts, we measure mobility as the correlation between a child's probability of at… Show more

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Cited by 754 publications

(570 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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533

Contrasting

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“…Intergenerational rank-rank correlations have changed little, if at all, since the beginning of the 20th century. This trend is consistent with recent findings from Chetty et al (17) and Hout (18), who use similar rank-based methods for data that cover only the 1970s to the present. Indeed, the dominant hypothesis in the literature was long ago proposed by Featherman et al (13), that relative mobility in all industrialized societies is constant or trendless, although empirical research using loglinear analysis has documented increases in relative mobility in some industrialized societies (e.g., refs.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 92%

Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s

Song

¹

,

Massey

²

,

Rolf

³

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Exaggerated anticipatory anxiety is common in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Neuroimaging studies have revealed altered neural activity in response to social stimuli in SAD, but fewer studies have examined neural activity during anticipation of feared social stimuli in SAD. The current study examined the time course and magnitude of activity in threat processing brain regions during speech anticipation in socially anxious individuals and healthy controls (HC). Method Participants (SAD n = 58; HC n = 16) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during which they completed a 90s control anticipation task and 90s speech anticipation task.

show abstract

“…Intergenerational rank-rank correlations have changed little, if at all, since the beginning of the 20th century. This trend is consistent with recent findings from Chetty et al (17) and Hout (18), who use similar rank-based methods for data that cover only the 1970s to the present. Indeed, the dominant hypothesis in the literature was long ago proposed by Featherman et al (13), that relative mobility in all industrialized societies is constant or trendless, although empirical research using loglinear analysis has documented increases in relative mobility in some industrialized societies (e.g., refs.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 92%

Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s

Song

¹

,

Massey

²

,

Rolf

³

et al. 2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Get access via publisher Add to dashboard Cite

Exaggerated anticipatory anxiety is common in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Neuroimaging studies have revealed altered neural activity in response to social stimuli in SAD, but fewer studies have examined neural activity during anticipation of feared social stimuli in SAD. The current study examined the time course and magnitude of activity in threat processing brain regions during speech anticipation in socially anxious individuals and healthy controls (HC). Method Participants (SAD n = 58; HC n = 16) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during which they completed a 90s control anticipation task and 90s speech anticipation task.

show abstract

“…Even though the intuition is that the IGEs increased slightly over the period, the Wald statistic was not significant, indicating that all 8‐year‐point estimates were identical. This finding aligns with prior studies showing that intergenerational income mobility in the USA has not changed, other than a slight increase in recent decades (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, & Turner, ; Hertz, ; Lee & Solon, ; Mayer & Lopoo, ). Nonetheless, this finding is inconsistent with other studies which provide evidence that the trends in mobility have declined (Aaronson & Mazumder, ; Bloome & Western, ).…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 91%

Intergenerational income mobility and inequality in South Korea

Nam

¹

2017

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Exaggerated anticipatory anxiety is common in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Neuroimaging studies have revealed altered neural activity in response to social stimuli in SAD, but fewer studies have examined neural activity during anticipation of feared social stimuli in SAD. The current study examined the time course and magnitude of activity in threat processing brain regions during speech anticipation in socially anxious individuals and healthy controls (HC). Method Participants (SAD n = 58; HC n = 16) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during which they completed a 90s control anticipation task and 90s speech anticipation task.

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“…1 reveals a cohort trend in China that is distinct from that in the United States. Confirming earlier research using either income-based ( 8 ) or occupation-based ranks ( 9 ), we find a relatively stable rank–rank correlation in the United States. Our estimates, around 0.3, closely resemble those in an earlier study by Hout ( 11 ) using occupational socioeconomic index ( Fig.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

Trends in social mobility in postrevolution China

Xie

¹

,

Dong

²

,

Zhou

³

et al. 2022

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Get access via publisher Add to dashboard Cite

Exaggerated anticipatory anxiety is common in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Neuroimaging studies have revealed altered neural activity in response to social stimuli in SAD, but fewer studies have examined neural activity during anticipation of feared social stimuli in SAD. The current study examined the time course and magnitude of activity in threat processing brain regions during speech anticipation in socially anxious individuals and healthy controls (HC). Method Participants (SAD n = 58; HC n = 16) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during which they completed a 90s control anticipation task and 90s speech anticipation task.

show abstract

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