Two quasi‐experiments are used to estimate the impact of parental divorce on the adult labor market and marital/fertility outcomes of adolescents. These involve individuals experiencing the death of a parent and legislative changes to the Canadian divorce law. Parental loss by death is assumed to be exogenous, the experiences of children with a bereaved background offering a benchmark to assess the endogeneity of parental loss through divorce. Adolescents whose parents divorced put off marriage and, once married, suffer a greater likelihood of marital instability, but their earnings and incomes are not on average much different from others.

We find that about 40% of a cohort of young Canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked, and 6%–9% have the same employer in adulthood. The intergenerational transmission of employers is positively related to paternal earnings, particularly at the very top of the earnings distribution, and to the presence of self-employment income and the number of employers with which the father has had direct contact. It has an important influence on nonlinear patterns in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings.

The intergenerational earnings mobility of Canadians born to immigrants is examined using the 2001 Census. A detailed portrait of the Canadian population is offered as are estimates of the degree of generational mobility among the children of immigrants from seventy countries. The degree of intergenerational persistence is about the same for immigrants as for the entire population, and there is more generational mobility among immigrants in Canada than in the United States. We also use quantile regressions to distinguish between the role of social capital from other constraints limiting mobility and find that these are present.

Intergenerational income mobility is lower in the United States than in Canada but varies significantly within each country. Our subnational analysis finds that the national border only partially distinguishes the approximately 1,000 regions we analyze within these countries. The Canada-US border divides central and eastern Canada from the US Great Lakes and northeastern regions. Simultaneously, some Canadian regions have more in common with the low-mobility southern parts of the United States than with the rest of Canada; that these areas represent a much larger fraction of the US population also explains why mobility is lower in the United States.