ABSTRACT
Research indicates that parents’ and children’s economic attainments are strongly correlated. Solon (1999a, 1999b) and Corcoran (2002), in recent reviews of the literature on intergenerational mobility, report that estimates of intergenerational correlations between fathers’ and sons’ long-run wages, earnings and incomes typically range from 0.4 to over 0.5, and that correlations between parental income and daughters’ incomes are similar in size to father-son correlations. The research findings have troubling implications for African American children’s economic futures since rates of childhood poverty are many times higher for African Americans than for whites (Corcoran and Matsudaira, 2005). Furthermore, several analysts report that the rate of upward economic mobility is lower for African American children from lowincome families than for white children from low-income families, and that the rate of downward mobility is higher for non-poor African American children than for non-poor white children (Corcoran, 2002; Corcoran and Matsudaira, 2005; Mazumder, forthcoming; Hertz, forthcoming).
