Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates Over the 20th Century

October 26, 2021

Abstract: We present the first estimates of long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for samples that are representative of the full U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that ask about father’s occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show a robust increase in mobility between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts, about half of which is driven by absolute convergence in racial income gaps. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly Black women, considerably overstates mobility throughout the 20th century.


Ilyana Kuziemko is a professor of economics at Princeton University, and serves as co-director of Princeton’s Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies. Kuziemko re-joined the Princeton faculty in 2014, after teaching at Columbia Business School from 2012-14, where she was the David W. Zalaznick Associate Professor of Business. From 2009-10, Kuziemko served as assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she worked primarily on the development and early implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Kuziemko has a wide range of research interests, including economic inequality, behavioral economics, investigating trends in redistributive preferences over time in the United States, the role of Civil Rights in changing political preferences, the U.S. criminal justice system, and the role of privatization in health insurance on health disparities. She is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Kuziemko received her A.B. in economics from Harvard University, a second B.A. in mathematics from Oxford University (where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar), and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University