Nasty, brutish, and shorter?: Fertility, mortality, and dynastic longevity: US cohorts since 1873

Dynastic models are widely used in economics, but the extent of dynastic behavior is unclear. I calculate a simple measure of dynastic success, the probability of dynastic extinction. Extinction probabilities were roughly 50% through the early 20th Century, fell over the next two decades to roughly 14%, and increased to 28% by the 1954 cohort.