We show that the patterns of intergenerational earnings mobility in Denmark, Finland,
and Norway, unlike those for the US and the UK, are highly nonlinear. The Nordic
relationship between log earnings of sons and fathers is flat in the lower segments of the
fathers’ earnings distribution – sons growing up in the poorest households have the same
adult earnings prospects as sons in moderately poor households – and is increasingly
positive in middle and upper segments. This convex pattern contrasts sharply with our
findings for the United States and the United Kingdom, where the relationship is much
closer to being linear. As a result, cross-country comparisons of intergenerational
earnings elasticities may be misleading with respect to transmission mechanisms in the
central parts of the earnings distribution, and uninformative in the tails of the distribution
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