Eduquant seminar: Eirik Berger Abel

In this EduQuant seminar, Eirik Berger Abel will present the following paper:

Living the American Dream: How Norway Became a High-Mobility Country

I estimate long-run trends in intergenerational mobility in income in Norway for a period that includes World War II and the creation of the welfare state. I show that persistence between fathers and sons was high in the early 20th century but decreased substantially for cohorts born between the 1920s and 1940s. The convergence of incomes between rural and urban areas explains about half the total fall in persistence. First, I relate this result to changes in education by using plausibly exogenous variation in the intensity of schooling from a primary school reform, which reduced the gap between cities and rural areas, and find that it significantly decreased persistence in incomes across generations. Second, I show that the returns to education fell dramatically at the beginning of World War II. Comparing persistence for a set of father-son pairs but using income for the father measured just before and after this shock, I find that the onset of World War II lowered persistence in income. These results suggest that equal access to education and a compressed income distribution are two key drivers behind Norway's transition to high mobility.

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