Surnames and social mobility: England 1230-2012

Clark, Gregory and Cummins, Neil ORCID: 0000-0001-7328-2967 (2013) Surnames and social mobility: England 1230-2012. Economic History working paper series (181/2013). Department of Economic History, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

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Abstract

This paper uses a panel of 21,618 people with rare surnames whose wealth is observed at death in England and Wales 1858-2012 to measure the intergeneration elasticity of wealth over five generations. We show, using rare surnames to track families, that wealth is much more persistent over generations than standard one generation estimates would suggest. There is still a significant correlation between the wealth of families five generations apart. We show that this finding can be reconciled with standard estimates of wealth mobility by positing an underlying Markov process of wealth inheritance with an intergenerational elasticity of 0.70-0.75 throughout the years 1858-2012. The enormous social and economic changes of this long period had surprisingly little effect on the strength of inheritance of wealth.

Item Type:	Monograph (Working Paper)
Official URL:	http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/workingPapers...
Additional Information:	© 2013 The Authors
Divisions:	Economic History
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions
JEL classification:	D - Microeconomics > D3 - Distribution > D31 - Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education > I23 - Higher Education Research Institutions J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies > J62 - Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility N - Economic History > N3 - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Income, and Wealth > N33 - Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Income and Wealth: Europe: Pre-1913
Date Deposited:	21 Nov 2013 14:06
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2024 04:55
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/54515

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