The United States Education System and Intergenerational Income Mobility

This study intends to determine some of the avenues through which parent income affects child income and if the public education system has the potential to increase income mobility and equalize economic opportunity. I find that the income elasticity between generations falls somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6, depending on other controls, and that this elasticity tends to be higher for the lower end of the future income distribution. However, certain education measures studied, such as the fraction of newly hired teachers and teacher salaries, could alleviate some of these effects.