The study of intergenerational mobility has a long history in the social sciences. Previous studies have proposed various mobility concepts, striven to overcome empirical barriers to achieve accurate national measures, and mapped out cross-country patterns and time trends of mobility. The three essays in dissertation contribute to a recent strand of this literature which seeks to understand the mechanisms through which social status is transmitted across generations. After an overall introduction in chapter one, chapter two uses recently published county-level data to study the determinants of intergenerational mobility, measured by income levels and teen birth rates. Following Solons mobility model, we study the impacts of public investment in human capital, returns to human capital, and taxation. The results show that better school quality and higher returns to education increase adult incomes and reduce teen birth rates for children from low income families. By comparing counties within or adjacent to metropolitan areas to other counties, this study finds that urban upward mobility is sensitive to parents' education while non-urban upward mobility is sensitive to migration opportunities.Chapter three employs court-ordered School Finance Reforms (SFRs) as quasi-experiments to quantify the effects of education equity on intergenerational mobility within commuting zones. First, I use reduced form difference-in-difference analysis to show that 10 years of exposure to SFRs increases the average college attendance rate by about 5.2% for children with the lowest parent income. The effect of exposure to SFRs decreases with parent income and increases with the duration of exposure. Second, to directly model the causal pathways, I construct a measure for education inequity based on the association between school district education expenditure and median family income. Using exposure to SFRs as the instrumental variable, 2SLS analysis suggests that one standard deviation reduction in education inequality will cause the average college attendance rate to increase by 2.2% for children at the lower end of the parent income spectrum. Placing the magnitudes of these effects in context, I conclude that policies aimed at increasing education equity, such as SFRs, can substantially benefit poor children but they alone are not enough to overcome the high degree of existing inequalities.Chapter four studies the Intergenerational Persistence of Self-employment in China across the Planned Economy Era. It finds that children whose parents were self-employed before Chinas socialist transformation were more likely to become self-employed themselves after the economic reform even though they had no direct exposure to their parents businesses. The effect is found in both urban and rural areas, but only for sons. Furthermore, asset holding data indicate that households with self-employed parents before the socialist transformation were more risk tolerant. These findings suggest that the taste for self-employment is an important conduit of parents effects on self-employment, and that the taste being transferred can be mapped to known entrepreneurial attitudes.

This dissertation explores intergenerational mobility and inequality in the early twentieth century. The first chapter asks whether economic downturns increase or decrease mobility. I estimate the effect of the Great Depression on mobility, linking a sample of fathers before the Depression to their sons in 1940. I find that the Great Depression lowered intergenerational mobility for sons growing up in cities hit by large downturns. The effects are driven by differential, selective migration: the sons of richer fathers are able to move to better destinations. The second chapter compares historic rates of intergenerational mobility to today. Based on a sample matched from the Iowa 1915 State Census to the 1940 Federal Census, I argue that there was more mobility in the early twentieth century than is found in contemporary data, whether measured using intergenerational elasticities, rank-rank correlations, educational persistence, or occupational status measures. In the third chapter, I detail the machine learning method used to create the linked census samples used in chapters 1 and 2. I use a supervised learning approach to record linkage, training a matching algorithm on hand-linked historical data which is able to efficiently and accurately find links in noisy in historical data.

This research studies the relationship between migration and different factors that affect an individual’s labor market participation. I focus on the effect of migration on risk preferences, fertility outcomes, and intergenerational transmission of education. The theoretical foundation is the utility maximization problem, where an agent maximizes constrained utility. I use reduced form analysis and secondary survey data that includes information about migration trips, migrant and non-migrant characteristics, and where applicable, location of the individual and location characteristics. The first chapter examines the relationship between childhood migration and the fertility decisions of adult women. The objective is to test whether migration before the age of twelve has a causal effect on the total number of children and the age at first pregnancy. In this analysis, I use a longitudinal dataset from Mexico, the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS). The identification strategy is based on the time-gap between events, the richness of variables on the dataset, and different estimation methods. First, the parents are the ones deciding to migrate, not the individual; and there are at least three years between the migration trip and the fertility outcomes. Second, I also control for individual and parents’ characteristics, and other fixed effects such as cohort, year, and location characteristics to account for endogeneity. The second chapter tests whether migration changes risk preferences. It also uses the Mexican Family Life Survey but uses a different definition for migration, adult migration. I analyze changes in risk preferences from migration by comparing measurements of risk for migrants and non-migrants at two different points in time. The identification strategy is based on a reduced-form analysis and the exploitation of the survey’s panel structure and representative design. To consider endogeneity, I use migration networks as an instrumental variable for migration. This migration network variable is built with the first survey round, which is representative of the country. The panel structure allows testing for changes in the variable of interest; similar to a difference in differences approach. The final chapter examines the transmission of education across generations for legal immigrants in the United States; it analyzes how educational outcomes of individuals compare to their immigrant parents. The underlying rationale is that if a person achieves higher education than his/her parents, then s/he “moved up”. Empirical evidence shows that parents’ education is correlated with an individual’s education level. Evidence is mixed on whether it is a causal effect from education or other factors of the parents; previous results depend on the mother’s or father’s education, and level of education. This research adds to this literature, and the contribution lies in using legal immigrants as the focus population, it characterizes intergenerational mobility through three generations, and controls for country of origin or region of destination. I use the New Immigration Survey data and a static reduced-form model.