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Intergenerational Elasticity

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.

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Sources

  1. Solon, G. (1992). Intergenerational income mobility in the United States. American Economic Review, 82(3), 393–408. link
  2. Black, S. E., & Devereux, P. J. (2011). Recent developments in intergenerational mobility. Handbook of Labor Economics (Vol. 4B, pp. 1487–1541). Elsevier. NBER Working Paper 15889. DOI: 10.3386/w15889

How to cite this page

ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Intergenerational Elasticity of Income (IGE). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/sociology/intergenerational-elasticity

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ScholarGateIntergenerational Elasticity (Intergenerational Elasticity of Income (IGE)). Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/sociology/intergenerational-elasticity · Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20539026