Generational mobility of immigrant descendants in Scandinavia

Abstract

We study intergenerational earnings mobility, family formation, and early schooling outcomes among the grandchildren of immigrant families in Scandinavia, using harmonized administrative records covering three generations in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Relative to children of native-born parents, Scandinavia-born children of immigrants exhibit substantially higher intergenerational earnings mobility—by 3.3 rank points at the 25th percentile of the parental earnings distribution, a difference driven largely by daughters. For daughters, this individual earnings edge vanishes at the household level when they have children with a foreign-born partner, but it persists—and is even larger —when their co-parent is a native Scandinavian. Third-generation cognitive outcomes echo this pattern: reading and math shortfalls of 0.3 standard deviations are almost entirely explained by the immigrant background of the co-parent, whereas the grandchildren of immigrants outperform their peers in English. Joint paper with Bernt Bratsberg, Anna Godøy, Timo Hener, Erica Lindahl, Oddbjørn Raaum, and Peter Rønø Thingholm.