CROSS‐COUNTRY RANKINGS IN INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY: A COMPARISON OF APPROACHES FROM ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY

Abstract This paper summarizes research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility – whether classified by income, education or social class. The literatures on education and income mobility reveal a similar ranking with South America, other developing nations, southern European countries and France tending to have rather limited mobility although the Nordic countries exhibit strong mobility. Estimates of mobility based on social class point to rather different patterns, and we demonstrate that these differences are most likely generated by intergenerational earnings persistence within social classes. The second part of the paper looks for explanations for the differences in earnings and education persistence and finds that mobility is negatively correlated with inequality and the return to education but positively correlated with a nation's education spending.     

Cross-Generation Correlations of Union Status for Young People in Britain

This paper investigates whether young people whose fathers are union members are themselves more likely to join a union. We find that young people with unionized fathers are twice as likely to be unionized as those with non‐union fathers; this rises to three times higher for those whose fathers are active in the union. This supports the idea that socialization within the family plays a role in encouraging union membership. It is not the case that the cross‐generation correlations we observe are driven by common within‐family characteristics (like occupation, industry and political persuasion) that are strongly related to union membership.     

Family Income and Educational Attainment: A Review of Approaches and Evidence for Britain

It is widely recognized that, on average, children from poorerbackgrounds have worse educational outcomes than their better-offpeers. There is less evidence on how this relationship has changedover time and, indeed, what exactly leads to these inequalities.In this paper we demonstrate that the correlation between familybackground (as measured by family income) and educational attainmenthas been rising between children born in the late 1950s andthose born two decades later. We then consider the extent towhich these associations are due to the causal effects of incomerather than the result of other dimensions of family background.We review the approaches taken to answering this question, drawingmainly on the US literature, and then present our own evidencefrom the UK, discussing the plausible range for the true impactof income on education. Our results indicate that income hasa causal relationship with educational attainment.     

Intergenerational Mobility in the United States and Great Britain: A Comparative Study of Parent–Child Pathways

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.     

Have Unions Turned the Corner? New Evidence on Recent Trends in Union Recognition in UK Firms

This paper reports results from a recent survey conducted on unionization in over 650 firms in the private sector in the UK. The survey shows that since 1997 there has been a slight fall in derecognition, but a relatively large increase in union recognition. This increase in new recognition agreements is consistent with the idea that the incoming Labour government had a positive effect on the ability of unions to gain recognition, either through the 1999 legislation or more indirectly through changing the political climate.     

The Economic Cost of Growing Up Poor: Estimating the GDP Loss Associated with Child Poverty*

One of the motivations for the UK government's target to reduce (and eventually eliminate) child poverty is the perception of a significant long‐term economic cost of growing up in poverty. This perception arises from the observation that individuals who experience poverty in their childhood earn less as adults, are less likely to be in employment, are more likely to engage in criminal or anti‐social activities and are more likely to experience poor health and lower life satisfaction. This paper quantifies these effects, and expresses them in terms of GDP losses to the nation. We begin by focusing on lost earnings that arise from poorer skills and reduced employment opportunities, and then move on to the wider costs associated with the higher crime rates, poorer health and reduced well‐being that are linked with growing up poor. We find a sizeable economic cost, with the cost of growing up in poverty amounting to at least 1 per cent of GDP.     

Educational Inequality and the Expansion of UK Higher Education

In this paper we explore changes over time in higher education (HE) participation and attainment between people from richer and poorer family backgrounds during a time period when the UK higher education system expanded at a rapid rate. We use longitudinal data from three time periods to study temporal shifts in HE participation and attainment across parental income groups for children going to university in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The key finding is a highly policy relevant one, namely that HE expansion has not been equally distributed across people from richer and poorer backgrounds. Rather, it has disproportionately benefited children from relatively rich families. Despite the fact that many more children from higher income backgrounds participated in HE before the recent expansion of the system, the expansion acted to widen participation gaps between rich and poor children. This finding is robust to different measures of education participation and inequality. It also emerges from non‐parametric estimations and from a more detailed econometric model allowing for the sequential nature of education choices with potentially different income associations at different stages of the education sequence.