SWITCHING REGRESSION ESTIMATES OF THE INTERGENERATIONAL PERSISTENCE OF CONSUMPTION
使用不完美样本分离的转换回归方法，纠正遗产接收测量误差，发现美国受信贷约束家庭的消费代际持续性远高于不受约束家庭，与理论预测相反。
The influential economic theory of intergenerational transfers predicts a negative connection between credit constraints and intergenerational mobility of consumption. Existing work has used bequest receipt to signal a parent's access to credit markets when investing in his children's human capital. However, measurement error in bequest receipt generates misclassification error and, in turn, attenuation bias. Employing switching regressions with imperfect sample separation to deal with this error, we show that the intergenerational persistence of consumption in the United States for credit constrained families is much higher than that for unconstrained families, contrary to what the theory implies. This means that children from constrained families are more likely to have consumption levels similar to those of their parents than children from unconstrained families. Our results are robust to the choice of bequest variables and other predictive variables in the switching equation.