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Main Authors: Lai, Tsung-Chih, Shih, Jia-Han, Chen, Yi-Hau
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23174
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author Lai, Tsung-Chih
Shih, Jia-Han
Chen, Yi-Hau
author_facet Lai, Tsung-Chih
Shih, Jia-Han
Chen, Yi-Hau
contents We introduce the upward rank mobility curve as a new measure of intergenerational mobility that captures upward movements across the entire parental income distribution. Our approach extends Bhattacharya and Mazumder (2011) by conditioning on a single parental income rank, thereby eliminating aggregation bias. We show that the measure can be characterized solely by the copula of parent and child income, and we propose a nonparametric copula-based estimator with better properties than kernel-based alternatives. For a conditional version of the measure without such a representation, we develop a two-step semiparametric estimator based on distribution regression and establish its asymptotic properties. An application to U.S. data reveals that whites exhibit significant upward mobility dominance over blacks among lower-middle-income families.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23174
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Nonparametric and Semiparametric Estimation of Upward Rank Mobility Curves
Lai, Tsung-Chih
Shih, Jia-Han
Chen, Yi-Hau
Econometrics
We introduce the upward rank mobility curve as a new measure of intergenerational mobility that captures upward movements across the entire parental income distribution. Our approach extends Bhattacharya and Mazumder (2011) by conditioning on a single parental income rank, thereby eliminating aggregation bias. We show that the measure can be characterized solely by the copula of parent and child income, and we propose a nonparametric copula-based estimator with better properties than kernel-based alternatives. For a conditional version of the measure without such a representation, we develop a two-step semiparametric estimator based on distribution regression and establish its asymptotic properties. An application to U.S. data reveals that whites exhibit significant upward mobility dominance over blacks among lower-middle-income families.
title Nonparametric and Semiparametric Estimation of Upward Rank Mobility Curves
topic Econometrics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23174