Publication

Working papers

Intergenerational mobility of immigrants in 15 destination countries

NBER Working Paper (2025), with 37 co-authors, R&R at American Economic Review
Coordination: Leah Boustan and Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen
We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differential rates of absolute mobility. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this…

Inherited Inequality in Latin America

Stone Center Working Paper (2025), with Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Paolo Brunori, Guido Neidhöfer, and Pedro Salas-Rojo
This chapter argues that relative measures of intergenerational mobility and inequality of opportunity are closely related ways of quantifying the inheritability of inequality. We review both literatures for Latin America, looking both at income and educational persistence. We document very high levels of intergenerational persistence and inequality of opportunity for education, with inherited characteristics predicting 29% to 52% of the current-generation variance in years of schooling. Inherited circumstances…

To Become or Not to Become French: Conscription, Citizenship, and Labor Market Integration

WIL Working Paper (2023), with Yajna Govind
We examine how changing the costs of acquiring citizenship translates into naturalization decisions for second-generation immigrants, and the effect of naturalization on their labor market outcomes. We exploit the abolition of mandatory military service in France as an exogenous reduction in the cost of citizenship for men. In line with the predictions of our theoretical framework, we find that the reform induced a jump in male naturalization rates, entirely driven by European Union citizens. Using a Synthetic…

Global Estimates of Opportunity and Mobility: A Database

Stone Center Working Paper (2026), with 17 co-authors,
Coordination: Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Vito Peragine, Paolo Brunori, and Pedro Salas-Rojo
This paper describes a new public-access online database containing internationally comparable estimates of inequality of opportunity for seventy-two countries, covering two-thirds of the world’s population. The estimates were computed directly from the unit-record microdata for 196 household surveys, using a suite of machine-learning tools selected to minimize the omitted variable and overfitting biases discussed in the literature. Overall, differences in opportunities account for substantial shares of total…

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