%0 Journal Article
%T Estimating Intergenerational Mobility With Grouped Data:  A Critique of ClarkĄ¯s the Son Also Rises
%A Alejandro Corvalan
%A Florencia Torche
%J Sociological Methods & Research
%@ 1552-8294
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0049124116661579
%X This article distinguishes three measures of intergenerational economic mobility that emerge when the population is divided into groups: overall individual mobility, within-group mobility, and between-group mobility. We clarify their properties and the relationship between them. We then evaluate ClarkĄ¯s use of surname between-group persistence as a preferred measure of intergenerational mobility in the book The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. We show that aggregate surname-level intergenerational persistence cannot be compared with individual persistence because group-level income averages captures diverse individual-level and group-level factors impossible to disentangle without additional identifying information. Furthermore, measures of group persistence do not address the problem of measurement error leading to attenuation bias, which is ClarkĄ¯s rationale to study surname mobility. An empirical example partitioning the population into groups based on racial/ethnic origins and a simulation clarify the relationship between these different measures of mobility
%K mobility
%K grouped data
%K intergenerational elasticity
%K measurement error
%K stratification
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0049124116661579