Persistently Unequal: Two Centuries of Rich Families in Uruguay

What is the long-term level of intergenerational transmission of wealth in a developing country such as Uruguay? We address this question by estimating the intergenerational persistence of wealth using rare surnames. To this end, we draw on a wide array of data sources, including merged administrative records for the contemporary period, post-mortem inventories from Montevideo for the pre-modern era, and surname records from the early twentieth century. The resulting database contains over 40,000 matched-surname observations, almost 10% of which correspond to rare surnames, increasing the likelihood of identifying related individuals. Based on these rare-surname data, we find that the intergenerational elasticity of wealth is very high—ranging between 0.11 and 0.25 throughout the period—which implies an implicit wealth elasticity of 0.76–0.84 between two successive generations.