Elite persistence in family: The role of adoption in prewar Japan

Abstract Why do elite families often maintain their social and economic status across generations? This paper examines the role of adoption in sustaining elite persistence in prewar Japan. Under the Japanese inheritance system, families without a biological son could adopt an heir to continue the family lineage and transfer assets and social status. Using novel father–heir linked data constructed from the Personnel Inquiry Records (1903–39), we compare elite outcomes between biological and adopted heirs. We find that adopted heirs were substantially more likely to remain elite and to reach the extreme upper tail of the income distribution than biological heirs. The results are robust to family, regional, occupational, and educational controls. Overall, the findings suggest that adoption functioned as an institutional mechanism that expanded the pool of potential successors beyond biological lineage, thereby strengthening intergenerational elite persistence in prewar Japan.