This paper uses quarterly county-level data to examine the relationship between opioid prescription rates and employment-to-population ratios from 2006–2014. We first estimate models of the effect of opioid prescription rates on employment-to-population ratios, instrumenting opioid prescriptions for younger ages using opioid prescriptions to the elderly. We also estimate models of the effect of employment-to-population ratios on opioid prescription rates using a shift-share instrument.

This article combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pretax and posttax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects inequality.

The intergenerational income elasticity (IGE)—the workhorse measure of economic mobility—has very often been estimated with short-run income measures drawn from two independent samples and using the Two-Sample Two-Stage Least Squares estimator. The IGE conventionally estimated in the literature, however, has been widely misinterpreted: While it is assumed that it pertains to the conditional expectation of children’s income, it actually pertains to its conditional geometric mean.

The intergenerational income elasticity (IGE) has been widely misinterpreted as pertaining to the conditional expectation of children’s income when it pertains to its conditional geometric mean, and is affected by serious methodological problems. This has led to a call to replace the conventionally estimated IGE by the IGE of the expectation.

The intergenerational elasticity (IGE) has been assumed to refer to the expectation of children’s income when in fact it pertains to the geometric mean of children’s income. We show that mobility analyses based on the conventional IGE have been widely misinterpreted, are subject to selection bias, and cannot disentangle the “channels” underlying intergenerational persistence. The solution to these problems—estimating the IGE of expected income or earnings—returns the field to what it has long meant to estimate.