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Divided Landscapes of Economic Opportunity: The Canadian Geography of Intergenerational Income Mobility

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  • Miles Corak

    (University of Ottawa)

Abstract

Intergenerational income mobility varies significantly across Canada, with the landscape clustering into four broad regions. These are not geographically contiguous, and provincial boundaries are not the dividing lines. The important exception is Manitoba, which has noticeably less intergenerational mobility among eight indicators derived from a large administrative data set for a cohort of men and women born between 1963 and 1970. These indicators are derived for each of the 266 Census Divisions in the 1986 Canadian Census. They show that higher mobility communities are located in Southwestern Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, and tend to be correlated with lower poverty, less income inequality, and a higher share of immigrants.

Suggested Citation

  • Miles Corak, 2017. "Divided Landscapes of Economic Opportunity: The Canadian Geography of Intergenerational Income Mobility," Working Papers 2017-043, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    • Handle: RePEc:hka:wpaper:2017-043
    Note: MIP
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    File URL: http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Corak_2017_Divided_Landscapes_r2.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Anja Gaentzsch & Gabriela Zapata Román, 2018. "More educated, less mobile? Diverging trends in income and educational mobility in Chile and Peru," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series 312018, GDI, The University of Manchester.
    2. Iryna Kyzyma & Olaf Groh-Samberg, 2020. "Estimation of intergenerational mobility in small samples: evidence from German survey data," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 151(2), pages 621-643, September.
    3. Plante, Charles, 2020. "How to Calculate the Costs of Poverty in Canada: Comment on the Nathan Laurie Approach and Recommended Improvements," SocArXiv zshqv, Center for Open Science.
    4. Aydede Yigit, 2020. "Assortative preferences in choice of major," IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Sciendo & Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 9(1), pages 1-25, March.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    intergenerational mobility; equality of opportunity; geography;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion

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