As the interest in Economics on inequality has exploded, intergenerational mobility is one of the fundamental areas concerning inequality since it is related to many normative questions such as equal opportunity and fairness. Despite its importance, research on measuring intergenerational mobility has received relatively little attention. The dominant approach is still the scalar-based regression approach, which employs a regression of some statistics of offspring on some statistics of parents. In connection with this issue, this dissertation introduces a novel measure for intergenerational mobility based on modern economic theory and empirically analyzes intergenerational mobility in the U.S. and Korea.The first chapter analyzes the empirical aspect of the relationship between parental income trajectory and a child's success in the U.S. using a novel approach, functional approach.In particular, we find that parental income when their children are in their late teens is more correlated with children's income in their early 30s. In addition, children whose parental income tends to increase in their late teens are more likely to have a higher economic position than their parents. This implies that upward income mobility is positively associated with the steadily increasing economic status of the family over the first 20 years of children's life. Investigated further are the effects on explaining a child's success of the role of other trajectories, such as the family structure of unemployment and job type of household head, and the impact of parental education level. We also investigate the association between parental income profile and their children's college attendance and derive a similar finding that late teens are crucial periods when parents' income has a more significant impact on children's educational success.While the first chapter addresses issues in intergenerational mobility in the U.S., the second chapter focuses on intergenerational mobility in Korea. In the second chapter, using a similar approach to Chapter 1, we analyze the intergenerational mobility in all three dimensions - income, education, and occupation. In addition, reflecting Korea's unique historical and social characteristics, we study the association between investment in private tutoring and a child's economic and educational success. Our findings highlight the importance of parental intervention in teens on a child's educational success. The pattern of parental income profile of the upward mobility group shows a stronger upward trend than that of the downward mobility group, similar to what we observe in the U.S. data in Chapter 1. In Korea, both upward and downward mobility groups show steadily increasing parental income trajectories, reflecting the rapid economic growth Korea has experienced over the last six decades. This interesting and unique finding of mobility patterns in Korea reveals various social and economic structural changes Korea has gone through.The third chapter studies the various methodological issues. In this chapter, we consider how our functional estimate can be varied by the fluctuation of measurement error in parental income. Using Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, we decompose parental income into permanent and transitory components and consider the transitory component as a measurement error. We also compare our estimation method with the methods based on the fixed basis approach. Using too many bases in this approach yields nonsensical estimates, while the estimates using too few bases strongly depend on the shape of the basis. We also find that the fixed basis approach is not robust to measurement error. A possible endogeneity issue is also studied in this chapter. Parental income can affect their children's success through two channels, transmission of human capital and providing financial resources. To focus on the effect of financial resources, we measure intergenerational income mobility using instrumental variables to control the effect of human capital.

How does economic mobility over the individual life course shape population-level trends in economic inequality, and, in turn, how does this inequality influence individuals' economic mobility prospects? Historically, allowing opportunities for economic mobility has been seen as an American alternative to equalizing incomes. However, after decades of rising inequality across the population and persistent disparity between racial groups, many academics and policymakers have come to question how neatly we can separate the two.

This dissertation considers how societies ought to evaluate and respond to changes over time in their members' social and economic status, often referred to as social and economic mobility. In particular, it identifies a normatively interesting tension at the heart of mobility and attempt to resolve it. It is widely agreed that upward relative mobility is desirable, in part because it allows those who are currently disadvantaged a chance to improve their lot. But it is also widely believed that downward mobility is undesirable. Yet upward relative mobility requires downward relative mobility: just as not every child in Lake Wobegon can be above average, not every individual in a society with relative mobility can maintain her position in the economic hierarchy. The first two essays in this dissertation argue that when ensuring relative mobility and pursuing other important aims conflicts with preventing downward mobility, the latter aim should in general give way. The first does so by reviewing and normatively critiquing existing policies, such as unemployment insurance and asset protection in bankruptcy law, that distinctively protect individuals against downward mobility; the second, meanwhile, examines the normative questions that downward mobility raises through the prism of a specific, prominent approach within political philosophy: John Rawls's theory of justice. Another question the dissertation examines concerns the reasons why relative social and economic mobility (i.e. individuals, households, or families changing places over time in the economic distribution) might be desirable. Many politicians and policymakers have stressed the importance of relative mobility, and much empirical research on relative mobility has been carried out by economists and sociologists. However, the normative implications of relative mobility remain largely underexplored. The third essay explores these implications, examining connections between mobility and various forms of equality as well as between mobility and economic efficiency.

This doctoral dissertation is divided in three chapters. While all of them deal with the measurement and determinants of economic mobility and (in)equality of opportunity, each has a distinct topic and focuses on a special facet of the opportunity and mobility puzzle. One size doesn't t all: A quantile analysis of intergenerational income mobility in the U.S. (1980-2010) Conventional wisdom and previous literature suggest that economic mobility is lower at the tails of the income distribution; however, the few studies that have estimated intergenerational income elasticity (IGE) at di erent points of the distribution in the U.S. were limited by small samples, arrived at disparate results, and had not estimated the trend of elasticity over time. In the rst chapter of this dissertation a large sample of income observations in the 1980-2010 period for the U.S. is built using the PSID database, which allows us to obtain robust quantile estimates of the IGE both for the pooled sample and for each wave. For the pooled sample, the IGE shows a U-shaped relation with the income distribution, with higher values at the tails (0.64 at the tenth percentile and 0.48 at the ninety- fth percentile) and a minimum value {highest mobility- of 0.38 at the seventieth percentile. The trend evolution of the IGE also varies across the income distribution: at the lower and mid quantiles, income mobility increased during the 80s and 90s but declined in the 00s, while for the higher quantiles it remained relatively stable along the whole period. Finally, the impact of education and race on mobility is evaluated. Both factors are found to be important and related to the position at the income distribution...