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A Lifecycle Estimator of Intergenerational Income Mobility
Ursula Mello, Martin Nybom & Jan Stuhler
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Lacking lifetime income data, most intergenerational mobility estimates are subject to lifecycle bias. Using long income series from Sweden and the US, we illustrate that standard correction methods struggle to account for one important property of income processes: children from affluent families experience faster income growth, even conditional on their own characteristics. We propose a lifecycle estimator that captures this pattern and performs well across different settings. We apply the estimator to study mobility trends, including for recent cohorts that could not be considered in prior work. Despite rising income inequality, intergenerational mobility remained largely stable in both countries.
The curvilinear effects of objective and subjective socioeconomic status on economic conservatism and welfare policy support among middle-class Americans
Mason Burns & Elizabeth Ray
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated the hypothesis that the effects of objective and subjective socioeconomic status on Americans' economic and political attitudes are curvilinear in nature, with middle-status Americans being more economically conservative and more opposed to welfare than linear trends suggest. Across five studies (N = 9307), including data from Pew Research Data and the International Social Survey Programme, we consistently found that middle-status participants opposed welfare programs and reported being more economically conservative than linear trends indicated, such that middle-status Americans appeared more similar to high-status Americans than previously considered. These results indicate curvilinear effects of status and suggest that middle-status Americans may be overlooked in research focusing on linear effects of status on political and economic attitudes. Discussion surrounds the potential explanations for these curvilinear effects and the implications of these effects on economic and political outcomes as well as research on related topics.
Privileged and Picky: How a Sense of Disadvantage or Advantage Influences Consumer Pickiness Through Psychological Entitlement
Bryce Pyrah, Chelsea Galoni & Jing Wang
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Growing inequality continues to impact consumers’ lives, further widening the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. The present work examines how these inequalities impact consumer pickiness, defined as the latitude of acceptance around idiosyncratic ideal points. Across eight studies, including an analysis of consumer panel data, a study in the field at a local food pantry, and six preregistered experiments, we find that a sense of disadvantage leads consumers to be less picky while a sense of advantage leads consumers to be pickier. We find evidence that this process is driven by differences in psychological entitlement: A sense of disadvantage leads consumers to feel less entitled and a sense of advantage leads consumers to feel more entitled, driving subsequent pickiness. Importantly, while some might think that those who are advantaged might be pickier because they have more resources or access to products, we find these differences in the absence of resource or other external constraints, further speaking to entitlement as an important psychological mechanism. We find that the effects are moderated by social-dominance orientation. The impact of disadvantage versus advantage on entitlement and subsequent pickiness is attenuated for individuals who do not endorse existing inequalities.
Minimum Wages and Poverty: New Evidence from Dynamic Difference-in-Differences Estimates
Richard Burkhauser, Drew McNichols & Joseph Sabia
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study re-examines Dube (2019), which finds large and statistically significant poverty-reducing effects of the minimum wage. We show that his estimated elasticities are fragile and sensitive to (1) time period under study, (2) choice of macroeconomic controls, (3) limiting counterfactuals to geographically proximate states (“close controls”), which poorly match treatment states' pre-treatment poverty trends, and (4) accounting for potential bias caused by heterogeneous and dynamic treatment effects. Using data spanning nearly four decades from the March Current Population Survey and a dynamic difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, we find that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is associated with a (statistically insignificant) 0.17 percent increase in the probability of longer-run poverty among all persons. With 95% confidence, we can rule out long-run poverty elasticities with respect to the minimum wage of less than -0.129. Our null results persist across a variety of DiD estimation strategies, including two-way fixed effects, stacked DiD, Callaway and Sant'Anna, and synthetic DiD. We conclude that, to date, the preponderance of evidence suggests that minimum wage increases are an ineffective policy strategy for alleviating poverty.
Counting the Poor: The Liquidity-Adjusted Supplemental Expenditure Poverty Measure
Sung Ah Bahk, John Fitzgerald & Robert Moffitt
NBER Working Paper, April 2025
Abstract:
Most poverty calculations use income-based or consumption-based measures. We introduce a new, third measure of poverty status which is based on household expenditure. Expenditure is the theoretically correct measure of resources actually transferred into a given period in the life cycle. But the presence of illiquid service flows from durable goods, which can only be used to purchase that good in the minimum standard of living bundle and no other good, requires an adjustment both to resources and to the poverty threshold to allow a proper comparison of liquid resources to liquidity-adjusted thresholds. We also show that the expenditure impact of transfers on the poverty rate requires an adjustment for effects of transfers on precautionary saving and for their role as consumption insurance. Using the 2009-2022 Consumer Expenditure Survey, our liquidity-adjusted poverty measure yields a 2022 poverty rate of 8.3 percent, declining by 11 percent since 2009. Our measure trends in broadly similar ways to income- and consumption-based measures but only because differences in how thresholds and resources are calculated are offsetting. We also find that accounting for precautionary saving and the insurance role of transfers could make the anti-poverty impact of transfers somewhat smaller than that estimated ignoring these effects.
Genetic and Socioeconomic Achievement Gaps in Elementary School
Mikkel Aagaard Houmark et al.
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Socioeconomic (SES) gaps in academic achievement are well documented. We show that a very similar gap exists with respect to genetic differences measured by a polygenic score (PGS) for educational attainment. The genetic gap increases during elementary school, but only among the low SES children. Consequently, the high PGS children experience the largest achievement growth over the school years, even if they are born in socioeconomic disadvantage. While the SES gap is partly explained by selection into different neighbourhoods and schools, the PGS gap is not. However, a higher PGS is related to higher conscientiousness and a better subjective learning environment, even conditional on family fixed effects. These findings contribute to our understanding of how genetic and socioeconomic factors interact throughout the educational journey, offering insights for developing more targeted and effective educational interventions.
Learning to avoid: The long-term effects of adolescent welfare participation on voting habits in adulthood
Nathan Micatka
Policy Studies Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Welfare participation is associated with lower turnout among adults. For many citizens, however, their first experiences with welfare occur during a critical time of political development in adolescence. Does growing up on welfare lower turnout in young adulthood? I identify three mechanisms linking adolescent welfare experience to voting: stigma, the absence of pro-civics role models, and ineffective support from government welfare programs. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I find that non-Hispanic white adolescents who grow up on welfare are 6–17 percentage points less likely to vote compared to those without welfare experience. Adolescent welfare participation is unrelated to voting among Black and Hispanic youths. Interviews and focus groups find support for the three mechanisms. These findings highlight the importance of adolescent policy experiences for voting.
Marrying a Billionaire: Studying US American billionaires’ family biographies using the Forbes World’s Billionaires List, 2010–2022
Ria Wilken
Review of Economics of the Household, June 2025, Pages 707-735
Abstract:
Despite the recent findings on the inequality-increasing effect of homogeneous marriages, the growing body of literature on ‘the super-rich’, has missed out on illuminating contemporary global wealth inequality levels from a marital choice perspective. Not much is known about family formation at the top of the wealth distribution. By combining Forbes billionaires rich list data and billionaires’ Wikipedia articles with qualitative data, the paper presents a unique dataset capturing all US American billionaires (n = 948) and their spouses. The results suggest deeply ingrained traditional role allocations in billionaire couples. Female billionaires appear to be more likely to have a partner in the same upper-class fraction than male billionaires, who appear to be more liberal regarding their spouses’ class positions. By shedding light on the unique marriage demographics of the super-rich, the paper supports the importance of dynasty-making family strategies and social closure for understanding the economic elites of our times.
The Economic Effects of Place: Evidence from Child Migration during the Orphan Train Movement
Maxwell Bullard & Jacob Van Leeuwen
Texas A&M University Working Paper, May 2025
Abstract:
This project evaluates the lifetime and intergenerational impact of place on socioeconomic outcomes stemming from the Orphan Train Movement, the relocation of approximately 300,000 orphaned and surrendered children in New York City to families across the U.S. from 1853 to 1929. Utilizing a "first-in-first-out" mechanism that generated quasi-random assignment of children across the U.S., we estimate the effect of place, defined as a set of institutional characteristics, on a broad set of measures for Orphan Train riders and their descendants. To do this, we develop a novel dataset by digitizing information from historical ledgers, research documents, and state-level censuses during this period to identify children in participating orphanages. We link these data to a panel of complete-count decennial U.S. Censuses from 1850 to 1940. We find that riders who were placed in more residentially developed, wealthy, and populous counties have higher lifetime occupational income scores, have fewer children, and are less likely to farm. These effects persist into the subsequent generation.
The 'I' in Egalitarianism: Hadza Hunter-Gatherers Averse to Inequality Primarily when Personally Unfavourable
Kristopher Smith et al.
Washington State University Working Paper, March 2025
Abstract:
Many anthropologists and economists contend that humans are characterized by strong, universal, other-regarding equality preferences with deep evolutionary roots. Certain contemporary forager groups are indeed characterized by endemic food-sharing and proscriptions against resource monopolization. Some view these “egalitarian” practices as the consequence of an intrinsic desire for fairness. The present study tests this using a one-player “give-or-take” experiment that better emulates the realities of forager sharing ecologies than previous giving experiments. We asked 117 Hadza participants in private to redistribute food resources between themselves and another camp member in response to both advantageous and disadvantageous endowments. Although few participants were wholly self-interested, most did not seek equitable distributions. Instead, most participants tolerated inequality when it benefited them but were intolerant of inequality when it benefited others. Even when given advantageous endowments, only a minority (40.9%) chose to give, while a substantial fraction (30%) exacerbated inequality by taking more. Moreover, when given disadvantageous endowments, many participants took more than was necessary to achieve equality. The modal decision across tasks was to take everything. We also observed sex and age differences, with men and younger individuals being more likely to share advantageous endowments. These results suggest that intrinsic, private other-regarding fairness preferences need not underlie widespread forager food-sharing, which could be maintained by self-interest enforced by others (i.e., “demand sharing”) or by extrinsically maintained norms of fairness. Further, we find that individuals with greater exposure to cultures outside Hadzaland were more tolerant of unfavourable inequality, suggesting that marketization might promote not only greater material inequality but also stronger norms of tolerance toward disadvantageous inequality.
Inequality and Social Ties: Evidence from 15 U.S. Data Sets
Cristobal Young et al.
Sociological Science, May 2025
Abstract:
What is the relationship between inequality and social ties? Do personal networks, group memberships, and connections to social resources help level the playing field, or do they reinforce economic disparities? We examine two core empirical issues: the degree of inequality in social ties and their consolidation with income. Using 142,000 person-wave observations from 15 high-quality U.S. data sets, we measure the quantity and quality of social ties and examine their distribution. Our findings show that (1) the Gini coefficient for social ties often exceeds that of income and (2) social ties are concentrated among those with the highest incomes. We introduce an overall inequality–consolidation curve, demonstrating that social ties generally reinforce economic inequality. However, we identify one key exception: there is no class gradient in the use of social ties for job search. These findings contribute to debates about the role of social ties in perpetuating or mitigating inequality.
Traditionally advantaged group members’ affective and physiological responses to social change
Elena Bacchini et al.
Social Psychology, November-December 2024, Pages 295-305
Abstract:
Across four studies, we examined how traditionally advantaged group members respond to societal changes emotionally and in terms of collective action tendencies supporting the disadvantaged group. In two studies, we also used a novel technology to extract heart rate from webcam images as an index of participants’ engagement while reflecting on social change or stability. When social change (vs. stability) was made salient, participants reported less distress and less negative self-focused emotions, which mediated lower collective action tendencies. There were also signs of lower physiological engagement under conditions of change (vs. stability). We conclude that social change does not always trigger threat among members of advantaged groups but that -- ironically -- this can also undermine their engagement in realizing (further) change.