Decentralizing the Chilean miracle: regional intergenerational mobility in a developing country

We estimate spatially disaggregated measures of intergenerational mobility in Chile through an administrative dataset linking children's and their parents' earnings from the formal private labour sector. We report remarkable heterogeneity as we find higher and lower upward mobility in mining and agricultural regions, respectively, corroborating previous findings by Connolly et al. in 2019 with the distinction that Chile is a unitary state, implying that factors other than institutional differences shape mobility.

Automated summary

This study estimates spatially disaggregated measures of intergenerational mobility in Chile using administrative data, which links children's and their parents' earnings. The study finds significant heterogeneity in upward mobility, with mining and agricultural regions showing higher and lower mobility, respectively. This corroborates previous findings by Connolly et al. in 2019, but adds the distinction that Chile is a unitary state, suggesting factors other than institutional differences shape mobility.