Eminent Speaker Series: Prof. Jesse Rothstein - ONLINE ONLY

You are invited to join us for a thought‑provoking webinar featuring Professor Jesse Rothstein in conversation with Professor Robert Breunig as they explore how neighbourhoods and firms shape intergenerational mobility.

Abstract

Children’s incomes tend to resemble their parents', a relationship that is particularly pronounced in higher-inequality societies like the United States. However, the mechanisms behind this intergenerational earnings transmission are not well understood. Using a new dataset to look at the roles of neighbourhoods and firms in shaping intergenerational economic transmission in the U.S., this work has four main findings:

1. Neighborhoods are critical to intergenerational transmission. Holding parents’ earnings constant, children from higher-earning neighborhoods earn much more. The effect of neighborhood average earnings is as strong or stronger than parents' own earnings, capturing nearly all the variation in neighborhood "quality."

2. Parent's earnings reflect both their own skills (human capital) and the specific pay boost provided by their employer (the firm premium). Both components are transmitted to children's earnings, though the person component (reflecting parental skills) is transmitted more strongly.

3. Children whose parents or neighbors work at high-premium firms tend to grow up to work at high-premium firms themselves. This firm premium is transmitted across generations independently of human capital, strongly suggesting that networks play an important role in accessing high-paying jobs.

4. Black children grow up to earn less than white children, even when their parents’ earnings are the same. About one-third of this is explained by the differential sorting of Black and White families into neighborhoods with different mean parental earnings. Notably, none of it is explained by differential access to high-premium firms; the Black-White gap in average firm premiums is near zero.

These results point to important avenues for policy and research regarding intergenerational mobility. On the policy side, access to high-earnings neighborhoods is crucial, and policies to promote economic integration have promise to increase mobility. On the research side, it is important to better understand the role of networks in mediating access to good jobs. 

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About our Speaker

Jesse Rothstein is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Public Policy and the David Pierpont Gardner Chair in Higher Education. He is the co-director of the California Policy Lab, which he co-founded, with Till von Wachter, in 2017, and the director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education. He serves on the boards of the Society of Labor Economists and the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. He previously served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor; as Senior Economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President; and as director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at UC Berkeley.

Information

When: Tuesday 17 March 2026
Time: 1.00pm - 2.00pm AEDT (check the time where you are)
Where: Online via Zoom
Cost: Free of Charge - register below

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The timing of this event is AEDT (SYD/CBR/MEL).  View ESA Central Council's Code of Conduct