Like (Grand)Parent, like Child? Multigenerational Mobility across the EU

Marco Colagrossi, Béatrice d'Hombres and Sylke Schnepf

No 12302, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This study shows that the intergenerational transmission of inequality in most of the 28 EU countries is higher than what a parent-to-child paradigm would suggest. While a strand of the literature claims that this is due to a direct grandparental effect, economic historian Gregory Clark maintains that multigenerational mobility follows a Markovian process. In his view, previous estimates of social status persistence are not only (severely) attenuated by an errors-in-variables problem, but are also constant across time and space. Using a survey covering all 28 EU countries, we provide evidence against such a "universal law of mobility". We show that, while in most EU countries traditional estimates of social status persistence are indeed downward biased, there are sizable differences across countries driven by country-specific factors. Further, for a few EU countries we cannot reject the hypothesis of a direct grandparental effect after accounting for a number of parents related covariates possibly affecting the multigenerational transmission process.

Keywords: multigenerational mobility; education; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - revised version published in: European Economic Review, 2020, 130, 103600

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Journal Article: Like (grand)parent, like child? Multigenerational mobility across the EU (2020)
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