Intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain: a comparative study of parent-child pathways

Blanden, Jo, Haveman, Robert, Smeeding, Timothy M. and Wilson, Kathryn (2014) Intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain: a comparative study of parent-child pathways. Review of Income and Wealth, 60 (3). pp. 425-449. ISSN 0034-6586

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Abstract

We build on cross-national research to examine the relationships underlying estimates of relative intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain using harmonized longitudinal data and focusing on men. We examine several pathways by which parental status is related to offspring status, including education, labor market attachment, occupation, marital status, and health, and perform several sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our results. We decompose differences between the two nations into that part attributable to the strength of the relationship between parental income and the child's characteristics and the labor market return to those child characteristics. We find that the relationships underlying these intergenerational linkages differ in systematic ways between the two nations. In the United States, primarily because of the higher returns to education and skills, the pathway through offspring education is relatively more important than it is in Great Britain; by contrast, in Great Britain the occupation pathway forms the primary channel of intergenerational persistence

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28...
Additional Information:	© 2013 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth
Divisions:	Centre for Economic Performance
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology L Education > L Education (General)
JEL classification:	I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J2 - Time Allocation, Work Behavior, and Employment Determination and Creation; Human Capital; Retirement > J24 - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies > J62 - Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility
Date Deposited:	02 Sep 2014 10:31
Last Modified:	14 Sep 2024 06:36
Funders:	Russell Sage Foundation, Sutton Trust, ESRC
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/59332

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