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	Duncan Socioeconomic Index	Intergenerational Elasticity
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Regression model
Year of origin	1961	1992
Originator	Otis Dudley Duncan	Gary Solon (modern estimation)
Type	Composite occupational status score from education and income	Regression-based measure of intergenerational income persistence
Seminal source	Duncan, O. D. (1961). A socioeconomic index for all occupations. In A. J. Reiss Jr. (Ed.), Occupations and Social Status (pp. 109–138). Free Press of Glencoe.	Solon, G. (1992). Intergenerational income mobility in the United States. American Economic Review, 82(3), 393–408.
Aliases	Duncan SEI, socioeconomic index for occupations, SEI score, Duncan's index	IGE, intergenerational income elasticity, intergenerational income persistence, father-son income elasticity
Related	5	5
Summary	The Duncan Socioeconomic Index (SEI), created by Otis Dudley Duncan in 1961, assigns each occupation a socioeconomic status score derived from the education and income of its incumbents. Duncan calibrated the score by regressing the prestige ratings of a limited set of occupations on the percentage of incumbents with high education and high income, then used that equation to predict a status score for every occupation in the census. The SEI thus extends a small number of prestige ratings to the entire occupational structure on a 0–100 scale.	The intergenerational elasticity of income (IGE) is the workhorse measure of economic mobility: the regression coefficient from regressing a child's adult log income on the parent's log income. It expresses the percentage by which a child's expected income rises for each one-percent increase in parental income, so a higher IGE means income advantages and disadvantages are more strongly transmitted across generations and society is less mobile.