@phdthesis{Mehringer2019,
  author    = {Mehringer, Sarah},
  title     = {Essays on Intergenerational Income Mobility in Germany and the United States},
  doi       = {10.25972/OPUS-16069},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-160693},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {This dissertation consists of three contributions. Each addresses one specific aspect of intergenerational income mobility and is intended to be a stand-alone analysis. All chapters use comparable data for Germany and the United States to conduct country comparisons. As there are usually a large number of studies available for the United States, this approach is useful for comparing the empirical results to the existing literature. The first part conducts a direct country comparison of the structure and extent of intergenerational income mobility in Germany and the United States. In line with existing results, the estimated intergenerational income mobility of 0.49 in the United States is significantly higher than that of 0.31 in Germany. While the results for the intergenerational rank mobility are relatively similar, the level of intergenerational income share mobility is higher in the United States than in Germany. There are no significant indications of a nonlinear run of intergenerational income elasticity. A final decomposition of intergenerational income inequality shows both greater income mobility and stronger progressive income growth for Germany compared to the United States. Overall, no clear ranking of the two countries can be identified. To conclude, several economic policy recommendations to increase intergenerational income mobility in Germany are discussed. The second part examines the transmission channels of intergenerational income persistence in Germany and the United States. In principle, there are two ways in which well-off families may influence the adult incomes of their children: first through direct investments in their children's human capital (investment effect ), and second through the indirect transmission of human capital from parents to children (endowment effect ). In order to disentangle these two effects, a descriptive as well as a structural decomposition method are utilized. The results suggest that the investment effect and the endowment effect each account for approximately half of the estimated intergenerational income elasticity in Germany, while the investment effect is substantially more influential in the United States with a share of around 70 percent. With regard to economic policy, these results imply that equality of opportunity for children born to poor parents cannot be reached by the supply of financial means alone. Conversely, an efficient policy must additionally substitute for the missing direct transmission of human capital within socio-economically weak families. The third part explicitly focuses on the intergenerational income mobility among daughters. The restriction to men is commonly made in the empirical literature due to women's lower labor market participation. While most men work full-time, the majority of (married) women still work only part-time or not at all. Especially with the occurrence of assortative mating, daughters from well-off families are likely to marry rich men and might decide to reduce their labor supply as a result. Thus, the individual labor income of a daughter might not be a good indicator for her actual economic status. The baseline regression analysis shows a higher intergenerational income elasticity in Germany and a lower intergenerational income elasticity in the United States for women as compared to men. However, a separation by marital status reveals that in both countries unmarried women exhibit a higher intergenerational income elasticity than unmarried men, while married women feature a lower intergenerational income elasticity than married men. The reason for the lower mobility of unmarried women turns out to be a stronger human capital transmission from fathers to daughters than to sons. The higher mobility of married women is driven by a weaker human capital transmission and a higher labor supply elasticity with respect to spousal income for women as compared to men. In order to further study the effects of assortative mating, the subsample of married children is analyzed by different types of income. It shows that the estimated intergenerational income elasticity of children's household incomes is even higher than that of their individual incomes. This can be seen as an indication for strong assortative mating. If household income is interpreted as a measure of children's actual economic welfare, there are barely any differences between sons and daughters. The intergenerational income elasticity of spousal income with respect to parental income is again relatively high, which in turn supports the hypothesis of strong assortative mating. The elasticity of the sons-in-law with respect to their fathers-in-law in Germany is even higher than that of the sons with respect to their own fathers.},
  subject      = {Deutschland},
  language  = {en}
}