Kasey Buckles - Notre Dame
Family Trees and Falling Apples: Intergenerational Mobility Estimates from U.S. Genealogy Data
Date: 04/22/2021 (Thu)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: This seminar will be held remotely via Zoom. (Please sign in to see the link.)
Organizer: Joe Hotz
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
Meetings will be held via Zoom unless otherwise noted.
Meeting location: (Please sign in to see the link.)
9:00am - Sarah Nolan
9:30am - Rob Garlick
10:00am - Marwa AlFakhri
10:30am - OPEN
11:00am - OPEN
11:30am - OPEN
12:00pm - OPEN
2:30pm - OPEN
3:00pm - Joe Hotz
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
Additional Comments: We use an innovative strategy for linking parents to their adult children in the United States census to produce estimates of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status from 1850 to 1940. We begin with data from a large, online, crowd- sourced genealogy platform (familysearch.org), which includes millions of users who personally link records to the profiles of their family members. We include the links created by these users in our data set, but also use information from the links they create to inform other supervised and unsupervised matching methods. Our completed data set, which we call the Census Tree, contains hundreds of millions of links among the 1850-1940 censuses. This data set is beyond the current frontier in terms of the precision, recall, and representativeness of the included links. We use these data to produce estimates of the intergenerational transmission of characteristics including occupation score, literacy, and fertility. Because family members do the linking and often know the maiden names of women in their family, we are able to include women in our analysis where previous research has omitted them.