Intergenerational Income Transmission: New Evidence from Canada - ARCHIVED

Comparative studies of intergenerational earnings and income mobility largely rank Canada as one of the most mobile countries among advanced economies, such as Denmark, Finland and Norway. The assertion that Canada is a highly mobile society is drawn from intergenerational income elasticity estimates reported in Corak and Heisz (1999). Corak and Heisz used data from the earlier version of the Intergenerational Income Database (IID), which tracked income of Canadian youth only into their early thirties. Recent theoretical literature, however, suggests that the relationship between childrens’ and parents’ lifetime income may not be accurately estimated when children’s income are not observed from their mid-careers— known as lifecycle bias. The present study addresses this concern by re-examining the extent of intergenerational earnings and income mobility in Canada using the updated version of the IID, which tracks children well into their mid-forties, when mid-career income are observed.