Social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the United States, but remarkably little empirical evidence is available. The few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error, unrepresentative samples, or both. New estimates based on intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long-run income is at least 0.4, indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research. Copyright 1992 by American Economic Association.

Using 1979–2012 CPS data for the United States and 1975–2012 NES data for Great Britain, we study wage behavior in both countries, with particular attention to the Great Recession. Real wages are procyclical in both countries, but the procyclicality of real wages varies across recessions, and does so differently between the two countries, in ways that defy simple explanations. We devote particular attention to the hypothesis that downward nominal wage rigidity plays an important role in cyclical employment and unemployment fluctuations. We conclude that downward wage rigidity may be less binding and have lesser allocative consequences than is often supposed.