Essays on Intergenerational Inequality

James UguccioniDoctor of Philosophy Department of Economics University of Toronto 2022 This thesis contains three papers examining the sources of, and policy remedies for, intergenerational inequality. In Chapter 1, I consider how children are affected by parental job loss. I provide the first empirical evidence of the long-run effects of parental unemployment on children exposed before age 10 (and as young as 2), a period thought to be critical for child development. Using administrative tax data covering children born in Canada between 1972 and 1985 and random forest proximity matching, I estimate the causal effects of parental job loss experienced at different points in childhood on a child's income attainment. I find that children exposed to parental unemployment at ages 2 to 10 experience losses of 3 to 4 rank points in average earnings attainment in adulthood (approximately $2,500 per year). In Chapter 2, I study how the emigration of millions of Black families from the South in the United States, known as the Great Migration, affected equality of opportunity. I am among the first to consider how Black emigrants affected their counties of origin in South. I focus on how the Great Migration affected racial inequality in educational attainment, building off of previous work showing that Black emigration limited discrimination from local governments. Using a shift-share instrument to isolate the effects of Black emigration, I find that higher emigration rates caused the Black-white gap in average educational attainment to shrink considerably. Finally, Chapter 3, based off of joint work with Shari Eli, Price Fishback, and Adriana Lleras-Muney, explores the emergence of the modern welfare system in the United States. We study the political economy of the first welfare program in the United States, the Mothers' Pension, which paid monthly pensions to widowed mothers. Despite being legislated in 46 states between 1911 and 1931, counties were left to administer, and often finance, these pensions themselves. Delegating the payment of pensions to counties led to irregular coverage and the pensions ultimately being replaced by Aid to Dependent Children. We collect new data and provide descriptive evidence that local demographics played an important role in the adoption and the payment of Mothers' Pensions.

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