Stability and Persistence of Intergenerational Wealth Formation: Evidence from Danish Wealth Records of Three Generations. Boserup, S. H., Kopczuk, W., & Kreiner, C. T. October 2014. Unpublished manuscript
Stability and Persistence of Intergenerational Wealth Formation: Evidence from Danish Wealth Records of Three Generations [pdf]Link  abstract   bibtex   3 downloads  
This paper provides novel insights on intergenerational wealth mobility using Danish wealth records. Non-parametric evidence reveals an almost linear relationship between wealth ranks of children and parents with a slope of 1/4, except at the very top of the distribution where the slope is much higher. The wealth relationship is surprisingly stable across subsamples and after controlling for key socioeconomic outcomes. This is consistent with a unidimensional latent factor governing a substantial part of the complicated underlying wealth dynamics and wealth of past generations summarizing almost all relevant information when predicting child wealth. Wealth of grandparents has very strong explanatory power conditional on any level of parental wealth showing that standard two-generation measures severely understate the extent of intergenerational persistence in wealth formation.

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