Steven Durlauf

Delighted to post this wonderful conversation with Joseph Fishkin, whose brilliant book Bottlenecks has so deeply influenced my thinking about inequality and meritocracy.

The Effects of Parental Income and Family Structure on Intergenerational Mobility: A Trajectories-Based Approach | Becker Friedman Institute A rich literature within economics focuses on , or, the relationship between parents’ socioeconomic status and their children’s outcomes later in life. While much research focuses on how parents’ average income shapes that of their child, research also suggests that timing matters across childhood. Moreover, joint consideration of family income and family structure is less Read more...

Parental income and family structure during childhood shape adult income—especially in middle childhood and adolescence. These effects complement one another across key developmental stages. Research by Yoosoon Chang, Steven Durlauf, Bo Hu & Joon Park. https://ow.ly/kZeL50X7ott

Earlier this month, we hosted an authors' conference for the upcoming volume, "Whither Meritocracy?" published by the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Read the recap and preview what's to come → bit.ly/46VBKro

Very happy that exceptional conversation with Alexander Monge-Naranjo has posted. Alex's work addresses many aspects of inequality, from financial barriers to college attainment to the dynamics of spatial inequality in cities.

New paper! (And note that effects faded to a pretty precise 0 by six months later)

Very happy to share this terrific conversation with Francisco Ferreira @lseinequalities.bsky.social, with a focus on his foundational work on inherited inequality.

Recommended! Important evidence on declining mobility in Germany, consistent with an intertemporal Great Gatsby Curve.

Great opportunity.

5/Using the PSID, we show that later year incomes are more important for offspring income terciles than other years and there is especially high complementary between parental income during middle to late childhood and family structure during late childhood, among other results.

4/The analysis uses functional data analysis methods, some pioneered by my coauthors. The key idea is to use variants of the beautiful Karhunen-Loeve expansion to produce optimal approximations to the stochastic processes for the trajectories that may be used for estimation.

3/This allows one to measure interactions between the two trajectories within and across years, creating the possibility that complementary effects and substitution effects between trajectory values depending on which pairs of elements are considered.

2/The paper's methodological innovation is development of a framework to estimate family-specific transition probabilities which depend on the complete trajectories of family and family incomes across childhood and adolescence.

1/Very pleased to release this paper which provides a very flexible methodology for estimation of Markov transition matrices linking parents to children, joint with my brilliant coauthors Yoosoon Chang, Bo Hu, and Joon Park.

My papers arguing that the "Abundance Movement" needs broadening to include place-based jobs policies for distressed places are being released today, with a long paper at the Upjohn Institute & a shorter summary at Brookings Metro.

Very much looking forward to this event which celebrates the 10th anniversary of @lseinequalities.bsky.social.

Thank you @tderyugina.bsky.social for taking the lead on this important letter.

Very pleased to release this new paper with Giovanni Bernardo, Andros Kourtellos, and Chih Ming Tan on the measurement of inequality of opportunity.

Delighted that this conversation with the wonderful Wendy Carlin has posted.

Must read paper which provides fascinating evidence on the ways the Industrial Revolution generated social mobility.

Very pleased to post this new paper which provides some theoretical structures to study aspects of the dynamics of assimilation.

Exploring the role of social influences in majority language acquisition and language minorities and demonstrates complex comparative statics exist in such environments, from William A. Brock, Bo Chen, Steven N. Durlauf, and Shlomo Weber https://www.nber.org/papers/w34138

Let me highlight my coauthor, the brilliant Stone Center postdoc Kristina Butaeva @butaevak.bsky.social, who was the heart and soul of the project.‬

Delighted to release with paper with Kristina Butaeva, Lian Chen, and Albert Park. Many of the Markov chain ideas we develop are inspired by mobility ideas that originate in sociology, specifically about exchange versus structural mobility.

EJ Antoni for BLS Commissioner - Neither citations nor experience conducting statistical analysis needed (according to Daily Signal) #econsky
econbrowser.com/archives/202...

Delighted to post this great discussion with Eric Schliesser
@nescio13.bsky.social. And if you do not follow his substack digressionsimpressions you are missing a treat.

Nov 2024 paper assessing Antoni-St. Onge calculation of deflators #econsky
www.ssc.wisc.edu/~mchinn/OnAS...

Paper: A Statistical Critique of Antoni-St. Onge (Nov. 2024)
Given EJ Antoni has been nominated to be head of one of the most important statistical agencies in the country, we should know how much he knows about statistics #econsky
www.ssc.wisc.edu/~mchinn/OnAS...

2/The scholarly enterprise presupposes norms of integrity that are incompatible with assent to the destruction of the raw materials (data) from which social science is created. Why should I trust the research of someone failing to act ethically in the midst of this maelstrom?

Republicans Suddenly Distrust Jobs Data After Trump Fires Statistics Chief

1/ Is there any case of an academic who has joined the Trump administration resigning in protest or publicly defending the integrity of the BLS? Anyone purporting to be a scholar has an absolute ethical obligation to do so.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/u...