Panel Paper:
Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in Mexico
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
40.S16 - Level -1 (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Academics and policymakers have expressed concern about the persistence of low social mobility in Mexico. Most of the evidence provided so far by the empirical literature has been focused in the analysis of wealth, education and occupational status, but little has been done to analyse income mobility. The aim of this paper is to begin filling this gap an analyse intergenerational earnings mobility in Mexico up to 2011. Since there are no Mexican surveys with information on both sons’ and their parents’ earnings, I combine data from the ESRU Social Mobility Survey (EMOVI) 2011 and from the National Urban Employment Survey (ENEU) from the period 1987-1991 using the Two-Sample Two-Stage Least Square estimator (Arellano and Meghier, 1992; Björklund and Jäntti, 1997). In addition, I contrast these results with those from a rank-rank estimation (Chetty et al., 2014) at the national and regional level. The main result shows that intergenerational earnings mobility in Mexico is 0.51 or 0.31 depending on the estimator (Intergenerational Elasticity or Rank-Rank coefficient), indicating low intergenerational earnings mobility. At the regional level, strong intergenerational persistence is found in the South region (0.63), meanwhile the North-Centre region (0.29) presents the high social mobility compared to the national level. The North (0.48) and Centre (0.43) regions evidence social mobility levels close to that estimated for two the national level.
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