Showing papers by "Jo Blanden published in 2013"

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.

Intergenerational Persistence in Income and Social Class: The Impact of Within-Group Inequality

Abstract: Family income is found to be more closely related to sons' earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared with a cohort born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast with the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational mobility for this outcome is found to be unchanged. Our aim here is to explore the reason for this divergence. We derive a formal framework which relates mobility as measured by family income or earnings to mobility as measured by social class. Building on this framework we then test several alternative hypotheses to explain the difference between the trends. We find evidence of an increase in the intergenerational persistence of the permanent component of income that is unrelated to social class. We reject the hypothesis that the observed decline in income mobility is a consequence of the poor measurement of permanent family income in the 1958 cohort.