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This paper presents a three-generation migrant analysis, comparing the relative economic performance of various migrant generations to the native population. We develop a theoretical model to explain the relationship between the different earnings of the migrants over three generations and relate the model to the results in the literature. The empirical analysis explores the suitability of the theoretical implications based on data from the 1995 Israeli Census. We show that assimilation of the third generation into the local population is far from clear.

This paper aims to study the effect of family socioeconomic status (SES) on academic and labor market outcomes.

The authors used a rich data set of administrative records for test scores, individual background and adult earnings of a cohort of agents, covering a period spanning the agents' upper-secondary education and their early years in the labor market.

The authors find that students with the highest SES obtained a 1.5 standard deviations higher score in the college admission test than students who had the same academic outcomes in the eighth grade test but belong to the lowest SES. Similarly, among students that obtained the same scores in the college admission test, those with the highest SES earned monthly wages 0.7 standard deviations higher than those with the lowest SES.

The findings highlight that family socioeconomic background continues to influence outcomes during individuals’ upper secondary education and early years in the labor market.

Mobility implies initial and final distributions and a transition process linking the observations of these two distributions. An inequality index describes properties of the intitial or final distribution. A mobility index describes the transition. In most cases, mobility indices have been developed using properties of transition matrices independently of the concepts of inequality and equity that may also be used in the analysis. This paper presents a new tool – the Gini index of mobility – that provides an overall consistent framework for the analysis of mobility, inequality, and horizontal equity. The theoretical concepts are illustrated empirically using panel data from rural Mexico.

It is our pleasure as editors to dedicate Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 20 to Professor Jacques Silber. Jacques is a long-time friend of the series and has kindly functioned as a mentor and advisor to us.

This paper analyzes the impact of family background characteristics and social exclusion features on the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment and income positions, and the relative poverty risk in Germany and the United States. These countries vary widely by welfare regime, family role patterns, and labor market settings. From these differences we predict higher intergenerational income elasticities in the United States and higher intergenerational educational elasticities in Germany. Using longitudinal data from the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) 1980–2008, we find some empirical support for these hypotheses. In both countries, parental educational attainment stimulates intergenerational economic and social mobility, which accentuates the importance of promoting human capital accumulation.

Purpose: Using GSOEP-PSID the study analyzes the effects of redistribution policy on intergenerational income inequality, poverty intensity, intergenerational income mobility, and dynastic poverty persistence in Germany and the United States.

Methodology: To evaluate the extent and the intensity of dynastic inequality and poverty the paper employs inequality measures and poverty indices. The contribution of a set of human capital and labor market variables on intergenerational income mobility and the risk of dynastic poverty persistence is analyzed with linear and nonlinear regression approaches and a binomial logit model.

Findings: The empirical results partly corroborate that countries with a forced redistribution scheme succeed in reducing income inequality and poverty intensity, but at the expense of intergenerational income persistence and the relative risk of dynastic poverty persistence. In Germany, redistribution policy reduces income inequality and poverty intensity to a greater extent than in the United States, and the equalizing effect of public transfers increases with age. In the United States intergenerational income persistence and the relative risk of dynastic poverty persistence are more pronounced than in Germany. The contribution of gender, educational attainment, and labor market engagement to the intergenerational income mobility and the relative risk of dynastic poverty persistence is country specific and differ by age group.

Research implications: The results call for further research of the interaction of family-life, labor market settings, and social policy in determining the degree of intergenerational income mobility and dynastic poverty persistence.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the link between childhood neighbourhood ethnic composition and short- and long-run economic outcomes of second-generation immigrants and natives in Sweden.

The author uses Swedish longitudinal register data and apply regression analysis methods to investigate the correlation between three ethnic neighbourhood variables(share of immigrants, share of immigrants with the same ethnic background and share of immigrants with other descent) in childhood with short- and long-run economic outcomes (earnings, unemployment, reliance on social assistance and educational attainment).

The results show that second-generation immigrants raised in immigrant-dense neighbourhoods have a lower probability to continue to higher education, whereas, their earnings, unemployment and social assistance tendencies are unaffected. On the contrary, natives’ earnings and educational attainment are negatively correlated with, and the probability of social assistance and unemployment are positively associated with a high immigrant concentration. Moreover, the social assistance and unemployment of non-Nordic second-generation immigrants appears to be negatively correlated with the neighbourhood share of co-ethnics and positively correlated with the neighbourhood proportion of other ethnic groups. Overall, the author finds that the results are very similar in the short and long run.

This paper expands the literature on children and ethnic segregation and in contrast to earlier research in this context, it focuses on second-generation immigrants and their performance in comparison to natives. This study contributes to this research area by investigating a large variety of outcomes, looking at both immigrant, own ethnic group and other ethnic group concentration and including both short- and long-run correlations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the quality of teachers based on education and training provided under new reform policies in Malaysia affects their earnings outcomes. The study conducted a benefit and returns analysis guided by human capital theory.

The study used survey research methods to investigate human capital formation in the teaching profession using teachers’ qualifications, benefits and private rate of returns as key variables in the estimation.

Earnings and experience levels were highly correlated with teachers’ education levels, as suggested by human capital theory. The private rate of returns in earnings for each additional year of schooling of teachers was found to lie between 3 and 4 per cent per year. Discrepancies were apparent in teachers’ qualifications and licensure levels regionally and at academic levels, as expected. These correlated with earning levels.

Improvements in teachers’ salary and employment opportunities will attract higher quality graduates to the teaching profession. Teachers’ annual earnings in Malaysia are comparable to other public sector and private professional jobs in the nation but lag far behind those of the world’s top education systems. Increasing teachers’ earnings will attract better qualified teachers. Policymakers could address these issues.

This paper demonstrates the utility of economic analyses in terms of earnings returns, to evaluate the Malaysian policy of upgrading teachers’ qualifications as a mechanism to improve the overall quality of schooling. Such studies are rare but needed to understand the benefits and returns of policy-driven teacher education and training investments. This study provides new evidence of schooling returns using a recent, national data set.

Based on representative longitudinal data (CNEF 1980–2013) the paper analyzes gender differences of the level and the determinants of earnings dynamics in the work life of different cohorts of employees in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. Notwithstanding country differences concerning the existing welfare state regime constituting the institutional settings of the labor market, the educational system, and family role models, the empirical results show decreasing earnings mobility in the work history. The earnings level, educational attainment, family size, the occupational choice, the career stage, the birth cohort, and the macroeconomic fluctuations significantly influence earnings mobility. In the United States, earnings mobility is significantly lower and gender differences are less pronounced than in Germany and Great Britain. The gender gap of earnings mobility is less expressed for younger cohorts of German employees. The increase of the gender gap of earnings dynamics in the course of the work career indicates continuing heterogeneity of labor market behavior and outcome of women and men which contribute to persistent economic and social stratification.