Moving Towards Estimating Lifetime Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the UK

Paul Gregg, Lindsey Macmillan (l.macmillan@ucl.ac.uk) and Claudia Vittori

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility that use point in time measures of income and earnings suffer from lifecycle and attenuation bias. We consider these issues for the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and British Cohort Study (BCS) for the first time, highlighting how common methods used to deal with these biases do not eradicate these issues. To attempt to overcome this, we offer the first estimates of lifetime intergenerational economic mobility for the UK. In doing so, we discuss a third potential bias, regularly ignored in the literature, driven by spells out of work. When all three biases are considered, our best estimate of lifetime intergenerational economic persistence in the UK is 0.43, significantly higher than previously thought. We discuss why there is good reason to believe that this is still a lower bound.

JEL-codes: I20 J24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2014-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2014/wp332.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2014/wp332.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2014/wp332.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Moving Towards Estimating Lifetime Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the UK (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:cmpowp:14/332

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (cmpo-admin@bristol.ac.uk).