Education and Intergenerational Mobility in Occupations

A bstract The problem of measuring the intergenerational transmission of inequality and its implications for social welfare is studied. A possible decomposition of relevant factors–namely, educational attainments and other factors–is proposed and applied to three individual data sets regarding Germany, Italy, and the United States. The main result is that educational attainment is responsible for almost half of observed immobility The possibility that increasing equality of opportunity in entering the educational system may result in less inequality in income distribution is considered.