Jiang S, Qi L, Lin X. The Impacts of COVID-19 Shock on
Intergenerational Income Mobility: Evidence from China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health 2022;
19:11546. [PMID:
36141819 PMCID:
PMC9517413 DOI:
10.3390/ijerph191811546]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/30/2022] [Revised: 09/09/2022] [Accepted: 09/11/2022] [Indexed: 06/16/2023]
Abstract
The COVID-19 crisis has caused a huge negative shock to economic activities worldwide, leading to a reduction in income and changes in income distribution. Intergenerational mobility is an important indicator of sustainable social development. This paper explores the short-term impacts of the sudden COVID-19 pandemic on intergenerational income mobility and personal income in China. Using the variation in the number of confirmed cases across provinces, we construct a province-level pandemic intensity index and combine it with individual data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). We apply a general difference-in-difference strategy to identify the causal effect of the pandemic on intergenerational income mobility. We find that personal income is positively related to parental income, and that the COVID-19 crisis has caused a decline in individual income and exacerbated intergenerational income persistence. A more intense COVID-19 pandemic shock is associated with a larger increase in intergenerational income elasticity and intergenerational income rank-rank slope. We found that with one standard deviation increase in local pandemic intensity, the intergenerational income elasticity increases by 0.315 and the intergenerational income rank-rank slope increases by 0.198 on average. The mechanism testing suggests that heterogeneous effects among different groups are the force underlying the results. Low-income, low-skilled, and low-parental-income individuals have suffered a more severe impact from the pandemic shock.
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