揭示宇宙种族: 拉丁美洲和加勒比地区的肤色与代际经济差异

中文摘要

本文考察了肤色如何塑造25个拉丁美洲和加勒比国家的代际经济差距。首先，本文分析了族裔—种族身份与肤色的分布，证实了梅斯蒂索人的主导地位，并揭示了宽泛的分类范畴如何掩盖了显著的表型多样性。其次，本文记录了收入与教育方面的非线性差距，较深肤色始终与经济劣势相关联。方差分解结果显示，肤色可解释显著的组内变异，其解释力超越了自我报告的族裔—种族类别。最后，本文以母亲受教育程度为基准，提供了关于绝对教育代际流动性中肤色差距的新颖跨国证据，揭示了肤色较深个体向上流动所面临的障碍。利用来自墨西哥的机器评估肤色数据、并纳入额外父母背景和情境控制变量的稳健性检验，证实了这些差距的存在。这些发现表明，在研究拉丁美洲经济不平等时，有必要考虑表型变异。

Abstract

This paper examines how skin tone shapes intergenerational economic disparities across 25 Latin American and Caribbean countries. First, it analyzes the distribution of ethnoracial identities and skin tone, confirming Mestizo predominance and revealing how broad categories obscure substantial phenotypic diversity. Second, it documents non-linear gaps in income and education, with darker skin tones consistently linked to economic disadvantages. A variance decomposition shows that skin tone explains significant within-group variation, offering explanatory power beyond self-reported ethnoracial categories. Finally, using mothers’ education as a benchmark, the study provides novel cross-country evidence on skin tone gaps in absolute educational intergenerational mobility, revealing barriers to upward mobility for darker-skinned individuals. Robustness checks with machine-assessed skin tone data from Mexico, incorporating additional parental and contextual controls, confirm these disparities. These findings underscore the need to account for phenotypic variation when studying economic inequality in Latin America.