Housing Capital and Intergenerational Mobility in the United States

We document the intergenerational mobility of housing capital in the United States using a new dataset linking Decennial Census data to administrative property and income-tax records for over 3.4 million families.

We document the intergenerational mobility of housing capital in the United States using a new dataset linking Decennial Census data to administrative property and income-tax records for over 3.4 million families. We find that housing capital is substantially more persistent across generations than earnings. Moreover, the gap in housing capital between White and Black children widens sharply across the parental distribution, more so than the earnings gap. Using a capital accumulation and transmission framework, we study how assets and earnings jointly shape intergenerational housing capital persistence. Less than half of this persistence operates through children's earnings, leaving substantial scope for direct transmissions of capital assets and knowledge. Differences in earnings explain most of the White-Black housing gap at the bottom of the parental distribution, but less than half at the top. Finally, we present quasi-experimental evidence that local housing supply constraints amplify intergenerational persistence by widening homeownership gaps between children from lower- and higher-resource families. Together, our findings indicate that economic resources are more concentrated across generations than studies focused on income alone would imply.