return to education documented by Goldin and Katz (1999). Figure 5, adapted
from Mazumder (2012), shows that the father-son earnings elasticity moves over
the decades in tandem with the return to education—the changes after 1980
being the most notable. The increase in the returns to college from 9 percent
in 1980 to about 13 percent two decades later was matched by a significant
increase in the intergenerational earnings elasticity, from 0.38 to about 0.55.