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Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the Twentieth Century

Journal of Political Economy 2025 133(1), 306-354
We estimate long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for representative samples of the US-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that include father’s occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of nonwhite individuals and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show that mobility increases between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts and that the decline of Black-white income gaps explains about half of this rise. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly women, considerably overstates the level of mobility for twentieth-century birth cohorts while simultaneously understating its increase between the 1910s and 1940s.

Monopsony and Employer Misoptimization Explain Why Wages Bunch at Round Numbers

American Economic Review 2025 115(8), 2689-2721 open access
We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibit considerable bunching at round numbers. We run two experiments randomizing wages around $0.10 and $1.00 to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk; we fail to find any evidence of discontinuity in the labor supply function at round numbers despite estimating a considerable degree of monopsony. We replicate these results in administrative worker-firm hourly wage data from Oregon. We can rule out inattention estimates found in the behavioral product market literature. We provide evidence that firms “misoptimize” wage setting. More monopsony requires less employer misoptimization to explain bunching.