Studies of economic mobility summarize the distribution of offspring incomes for each level of parent income. Mitnik and Grusky (2020) highlight that the conventional intergenerational elasticity (IGE) targets the geometric mean and propose a parametric strategy for estimating the arithmetic mean. We decompose the IGE and their proposal into two choices: (1) the summary statistic for the conditional distribution and (2) the functional form. These choices lead us to a different strategy-visualizing several quantiles of the offspring income distribution as smooth functions of parent income. Our proposal solves the problems Mitnik and Grusky highlight with geometric means, avoids the sensitivity of arithmetic means to top incomes, and provides more information than is possible with any single number. Our proposal has broader implications: the default summary (the mean) used in many regressions is sensitive to the tail of the distribution in ways that may be substantively undesirable.

中文翻译：

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评论：用多个平滑分位数而不是参数化均值来总结收入流动性

经济流动性研究总结了每个父母收入水平的后代收入分配。Mitnik 和 Grusky (2020) 强调，传统的代际弹性 (IGE) 以几何平均值为目标，并提出了一种估计算术平均值的参数化策略。我们将 IGE 及其提议分解为两个选择：（1）条件分布的汇总统计量和（2）函数形式。这些选择导致我们采取不同的策略——将后代收入分配的几个分位数可视化为父母收入的平滑函数。我们的提议解决了米特尼克和格鲁斯基用几何平均值突出的问题，避免了算术平均值对最高收入的敏感性，并提供了比任何单个数字都可能提供的更多信息。我们的提议具有更广泛的意义：