Black-White differences in intergenerational mobility in the US: evidence from heterogeneity in sibling correlation

[PDF]

Abstract

In the literature on Black-White differences in social mobility there is a tension between accounts that report the existence of a “perverse openness” among African Americans and theories that predict convergence in the rates of social mobility of Black and Whites. I address this debate by asking three inter-related questions: (1) Does the sibling correlation in income differ for Blacks and Whites? (2) If so, is it because the effect of family background is different for the two groups or because Blacks and Whites produce a different extent of heterogeneity in economic achievement within the family? (3) Are Black-White differences in sibling correlation due to race-related factors? Can they be explained by the underlying socioeconomic characteristics of these two subpopulations? To answer these questions I develop Bayesian hierarchical linear models with “organized dispersion”, which permit explicit modeling of heterogeneity in sibling correlations and the variance components that go into them. Using PSID data I find that Black-White differences in sibling correlation for men are mostly explained by the higher within-family heterogeneity of Black siblings as compared to White ones. In turn, such larger extend of heterogeneity is partly -but not entirely- driven by the comparatively poorer socioeconomic standing of Black families. For women, similarity in sibling correlation is due to parental income having an opposite effect on within-family variance for Blacks and Whites, a pattern that is hidden in the describe comparison. Results highlight the interaction between race and social background at producing differences in mobility for the two major racial groups in the US.