Family Trees and Falling Apples: Historical Intergenerational Mobility Estimates for Women and Men
Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the US have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets linking parents to adult children, a challenge especially acute for women due to surname changes. We use a new dataset, the Census Tree, which incorporates genealogy data to link tens of millions of fathers to their sons and daughters in historical US censuses. We find that relative mobility was remarkably similar across sons and daughters in the 1835 to 1915 birth cohorts. Additionally, assortative mating was much stronger than previously estimated, as daughters married husbands with very similar backgrounds.
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