The Correlation of Wealth across Generations
发现，在遗产转移前，子女财富相对于父母财富的年龄调整弹性为0.37，其中终生收入和资产所有权解释了近三分之二的财富弹性，而教育、父母转移和预期遗产解释力较弱。
In this paper, we find that the age-adjusted elasticity of child wealth with respect to parental wealth is 0.37 before the transfer of bequests. Lifetime income and asset ownership jointly explain nearly two-thirds of the wealth elasticity. Education, past parental transfers, and expected future bequests account for little of the remaining elasticity. Survey measures of risk correlate strongly between parents and children. However, they explain little of the intergenerational similarity in the propensity to own different assets, suggesting that children's savings propensities are determined by mimicking their parents' behavior, or the inheritance of preferences not related to risk tolerance. Our results imply that while parents do pass on human capital and saving propensities to their children, the level of intergenerational fluidity is much greater than that suggested by recent accounts in the popular press.