Our objective is to obtain an accurate estimate of the degree of intergenerational income mobility in Canada.  We use income tax information on about 400,000 father-son pairs, and find intergenerational earnings elasticities to be about 0.2. Earnings mobility tends to be slightly greater than  income mobility, but nonparametric techniques uncover significant nonlinearities in both of these relationships.  Intergenerational earnings mobility  is greater at the lower end of the income distribution than at the upper  end, and displays an inverted V-shape elsewhere.  Intergenerational income mobility follows roughly the same pattern, but is much lower at the very top of the income distribution.

Miles Corak and Andrew Heisz are with the Analytical Studies Branch of Statistics Canada.  An earlier version of this paper was circulated under the title "Unto the Sons: the Intergenerational Income Mobility of Canadian Men. " Previous drafts also were presented to the meetings of the Society of Labor  Economists, the European Society for Population Economics, the Canadian Economics Association,  and to departmental seminars at Carleton University, Cornell University, the OECD, Statistics Canada,  and Syracuse University,.  The authors would like to thank Richard Burkhauser, Kenneth Couch,  Stephen Jenkins, Stephen Jones, Dean Lillard, Harry Paarsch, James Pesando, Andreas Stich, and two  anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions.  They would also like to thank Clive Loader  for making the S-plus code used in the nonparametric analysis available, and to acknowledge the help  of Jean Leduc, Linda Standish, and André St. Louis of Statistics Canada in constructing the data set.  They also thank Sophie Lefebvre for her able research assistance.  The contents of the paper are the  sole responsibility of the authors and in particular should not be attributed to Statistics Canada.  Correspondence can be directed to coramil@statcan.ca.