Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/299497 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-01518
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
How strong is the transmission of socio-economic status across generations in Latin America? To answer this question, we first review the empirical literature on intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity for the region, summarizing results for both income and educational outcomes. We find that, whereas the income mobility literature is hampered by a paucity of representative datasets containing linked information on parents and children, the inequality of opportunity approach which relies on other inherited and pre-determined circumstance variables has suffered from arbitrariness in the choice of population partitions. Two new data-driven approaches one aligned with the ex-ante and the other with the ex-post conception of inequality of opportunity are introduced to address this shortcoming. They yield a set of new inequality of opportunity estimates for twenty-seven surveys covering nine Latin American countries over various years between 2000 and 2015. In most cases, more than half of the current generations inequality is inherited from the past with a range between 44% and 63%. We argue that on balance, given the parsimony of the population partitions, these are still likely to be underestimates.
Subjects: 
Inequality of opportunity
intergenerational mobility
Latin America
JEL: 
D31
I39
J62
O15
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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