Knowledge that Transforms

The empirical literature on intergenerational income mobility in the United States has focused predominantly on sons. This paper partly redresses that imbalance by using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate intergenerational mobility among daughters. We find that intergenerational transmission of income status is somewhat weaker for daughters than for sons, but is still quite substantial. We also find that assortative mating is an important element in the intergenerational transmission process. 1Intergenerational Income Mobility among Daughters in the United States I.

A longstanding question in economics is why some countries are so much richer than others. Today, for example, income per capita in the world's richest countries is roughly thirty-five times greater than it is in the world's poorest countries. Recent work argues that the proximate cause of the disparity is that today's poor countries began the process of industrialization much later and that this process is slow. In this paper we argue that a model of structural transformation provides a useful theory of both why industrialization occurs at different dates, and why it proceeds slowly. A key implication of this model is that growth in agricultural productivity is central to development, a message that also appears prominently in the traditional development literature.