Abstract

This presentation broadly consists of two parts. In the first part, we introduce a new global database that offers estimates of intergenerational income mobility for 80+ countries across both the developing and developed world – and verify whether the Great Gatsby Curve (still) holds across this wider range of countries. In the second part, we present preliminary results from ongoing work that takes advantage of the global income mobility database. The first empirical study combines the estimates of income mobility with estimates of national (unconditional) income distributions spanning two generations – to obtain estimates of global income mobility and evaluate the relative importance of country effect versus parental income effect. The analysis explores the following empirical questions: Where does the world rank in terms of intergenerational income mobility? What determines one’s place in the global income distribution: country or social class? And where is social class most (least) important? In two companion studies, we look to explore two additional empirical questions: How much does social mobility contribute to social welfare? And how do countries achieve higher rates of social mobility as they grow richer?

Joint with Miles Corak, Aart Kraay, Branko Milanovic, and Ercio Munoz