Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/267348 
Year of Publication: 
2022
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 15611
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We provide the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility for a developing country, namely Brazil. We measure formal income from tax and employment registries, and we train machine learning models on census and survey data to predict informal income. The data reveal a much higher degree of persistence than previous estimates available for developed economies: a 10 percentile increase in parental income rank is associated with a 5.5 percentile increase in child income rank, and persistence is even higher in the top 5%. Children born to parents in the first income quintile face a 46% chance of remaining at the bottom when adults. We validate these estimates using two novel mobility measures that rank children and parents without the need to impute informal income. We document substantial heterogeneity in mobility across individual characteristics – notably gender and race – and across Brazilian regions. Leveraging children who migrate at different ages, we estimate that causal place effects explain 57% of the large spatial variation in mobility. Finally, assortative mating plays a strong role in household income persistence, and parental income is also strongly associated with several key long-term outcomes such as education, teenage pregnancy, occupation, mortality, and victimization.
Subjects: 
intergenerational mobility
inequality
Brazil
migration
place effects
JEL: 
J62
D31
I31
R23
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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