The intergenerational income elasticity (IGE), ubiquitously estimated in the economic mobility literature, has been misinterpreted as pertaining to the expectation of children’s income when it actually pertains to its geometric mean. The (implicit) reliance on the geometric mean to index conditional income distributions greatly hinders the study of gender and marriage dynamics in intergenerational processes, and leads to IGE estimates affected by substantial selection biases.

Periodic changes in occupational classifications make it difficult to obtain consistent measures of social class over time, potentially jeopardizing research on class-based trends. The severity of this problem depends, in part, on the measurement strategies used to address those changes.