Research

Job Market Paper

Intergenerational Transmission of Occupational Skills in the U.S.: A Machine Learning Analysis of Fathers’ Skills and Children’s Career Outcomes

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This paper shows that fathers’ occupational skills have distinct and systematic effects on children’s career outcomes using a multinomial logistic regression (MLogit) framework and machine learning models with SHAP interpretability.

• Fathers’ Technical skills increase children’s likelihood of entering service occupations and skilled labor while reducing entry into office and administrative tracks.
• Analytical skills exert the strongest single effect, raising entry into office and administrative roles by over one percentage point—a four-percent increase relative to baseline predicted probability.
• Communication and problem-solving skills channel children into education, healthcare, and transport, reflecting the interpersonal and operational demands of these sectors.
• Management skills reinforce persistence in business and managerial pathways but reduce entry into transportation.

While the average marginal effects appear modest in absolute size, their proportional impact relative to baseline occupational probabilities is substantial.
Key takeaway: Skills—not only credentials or parental resources—are the key currency of occupational inheritance.

Revise and Resubmit (R&R)

Legacy of Labor: The Impact of Parental Jobs on Children’s Career Choices and Income Inequality

Journal of Applied Econometrics
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This paper introduces a novel empirical model of occupational self-selection that integrates the Roy model with Becker and Tomes’s theory of intergenerational transmission. The key innovation is modeling innate skills using a bivariate Fréchet distribution, allowing for asymmetric, parent-influenced skill inheritance.

The main finding reveals that a significant proportion of children from middle- and low-income backgrounds are negatively self-selected into their parents’ occupations—meaning they would have been more productive and earned higher wages in other fields. Specifically:

• 11.5% of children from middle-income families
• 21.9% of children from low-income families
  fall into this category, indicating a misallocation of talent and a mechanism by which inequality persists across generations.

Intergenerational Self-Selection Model: The Influence of Fathers’ and Mothers’ Occupations on Children’s Occupational Outcomes

Journal of Applied Economics
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This paper applies the self-selection framework to compare the influence of mothers’ and fathers’ occupations on sons’ and daughters’ career outcomes.
Findings show that:

• Sons experience positive self-selection when following their fathers’ occupations, especially in skilled, high-wage fields.
• Daughters (and some sons) who follow their mothers’ occupations in low-wage sectors such as service or farming often face negative self-selection—they would have earned more in alternative careers.

These results highlight the gendered dynamics of occupational inheritance and the structural inefficiencies it perpetuates in the labor market.

Working Papers

Intergenerational Transmission of Occupations in the USA

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This study uses 56,952 parent–child pairs from the PSID (1968–2001) to examine occupational inheritance across the full occupational spectrum, rather than rankings.

• Occupational following is strongest at both extremes of the socioeconomic ladder.
• Sons of professionals have a 32.1% probability of entering the same field, while sons of service workers show a 25.8% match rate.

These findings show that inequality is reproduced not only through privilege but also through disadvantage, via occupation-specific human capital and intangible barriers such as soft skills.

Relationship between Intergenerational Mobility (IGM) and Economic Growth: Evidence from Cross-Country Data

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Extending Aiyar and Ebeke (2019), this paper combines GDIM 2021 and All the Ginis 2019 datasets and applies a dynamic panel System GMM approach to address endogeneity.
Key results:

• Income inequality reduces growth more sharply in countries with low intergenerational mobility.
• In high-mobility societies, this adverse effect is substantially muted.

These findings stress that fostering equality of opportunity is as crucial as reducing income inequality itself.

Other Research & Term Papers

• Exchange Rate Forecast Model: Factor Analysis — Develops a factor-based model for predicting exchange rate movements using historical macro-financial data.
• Public Debt, GDP & Crowding-Out Effect: Evidence from the USA — Analyzes how rising public debt affects private investment and GDP dynamics.
• Term Structure of Interest Rates in the U.S.: A Cointegration Analysis — Uses cointegration techniques to examine long-term movements in the U.S. yield curve.