ÖйúÒ»¼¶Æ¬

David Yang; Alberto Alesina; Marlon Seror; Yang You; Weihong Zeng

Does intergenerational cultural transmission hinder social mobility? We investigate the interaction between cultural transmission and social mobility in the contexts of China¡¯s Land Reform in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. These two revolutions represent two of the most extreme episodes in human history that aim to eradicate inequality in wealth and education, to shut off formal channels of intergenerational transmission such as inheritance and schooling, and to eliminate cultural differences among the population. Using newly digitalized archival data and linked contemporary household surveys and census, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the population in one generation. However, despite the extraordinary effort to foster mobility, the intergenerational transmission of cultural values occurred anyway, and two generations later, the descendants of the pre-revolution economic elites are significantly richer and much better off today than the descendants of the pre-revolution poor.