Results

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational income persistence in the Millennial generation

This paper provides new evidence on intergenerational income persistence for a recent UK cohort. Using Next Steps, a longitudinal study of people born in England in 1989-90 linked to administrative education records, we ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Train to opportunity: the effect of infrastructure on intergenerational mobility

Can transport infrastructure expand long-term labour opportunities and weaken the occupational link between parents and children? We estimate the causal effect of railway access on occupational attainment and intergenera...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Manipulation and selection in unemployment insurance

In this paper, we study the selection patterns of individuals who manage to have their lay-off delayed around an age at lay-off threshold entitling them to four additional months of unemployment insurance, that is, manip...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The benefits of elite universities are more social than academic

From Cambridge and Oxford to Harvard and Yale, elite universities are a feature of many education systems. Andres Barrios Fernandez, Christopher Neilson and Seth Zimmerman ask whether these institutions of higher educati...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and intergenerational income mobility: theory and evidence from the US

This paper studies how globalization influences intergenerational income mobility. We develop a dynamic economic geography model with overlapping generations, migration costs, and sectoral persistence. The model shows th...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Elite universities and the intergenerational transmission of human and social capital

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Paternity leave and child development

We study the effect of paternity leave on early child development. We collect survey data on 5,000 children under age six in Spain and exploit several extensions of paternity leave that took place between 2017 and 2021. ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Individual consequences of occupational decline

We assess the career earnings losses that individual Swedish workers suffered when their occupations' employment declined. High-quality data allow us to overcome sorting into declining occupations on various attributes, ...Read more...

CEP Insights

Social mobility

How much of an individual's success depends on their own hard work and how much on what their parents do for a living? A country where children from poor families are likely to be poor as adults and elite positions in so...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The dynamics of the 'Great Gatsby Curve' and a look at the curve during the Great Gatsby era

We use linked historical US censuses to study the empirical relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. We first confirm that the 'Great Gatsby Curve' already existed in the early 20th century. We the...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Parental education and the responses to higher SAT scores

Using discontinuities within the Swedish SAT system, we study the causal impact of additional admission opportunities on participation in higher education among high-ability students. Students with low-educated parents w...Read more...

Journal article

The Journal of Economic Inequality:

Intergenerational home ownership

This paper studies intergenerational links in home ownership, an increasingly important wealth marker and a measure of economic status in itself. Repeated cross sectional UK data show that home ownership rates have falle...Read more...

Journal article

Scandinavian Journal of Economics:

Where is the land of hope and glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales

This paper presents a new analysis of intergenerational mobility across three cohorts in England and Wales using linked decennial census microdata focusing on occupation, home ownership, and education. Four main results ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic History:

The long shadow of slavery: the persistence of slave owners in southern lawmaking

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance:

The effects of parental job loss on children's outcomes

Severe economic downturns are typically characterized by a high incidence of job losses. The available evidence suggests that job losers suffer short-run earning losses that persist in the long run, are more likely to re...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Parents, schools and human capital differences across countries

This paper studies the contribution of parental influence in accounting for cross-country gaps in human capital achievements. We argue that the cross-country variation in unobserved parental characteristics is at least a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trends in intergenerational home ownership and wealth transmission

Prior research on trends in intergenerational mobility in economic status has focused chiefly on income and earnings. There is hardly any research on trends in intergenerational wealth transmission, at least in part beca...Read more...

CentrePiece article

In brief... The long shadow of slavery

The politics and economy of the antebellum American South were dominated by those who practiced forced enslavement. Research by Luna Bellani, Anselm Hager and Stephan Maurer, which examines a database of Texas legislator...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Trapped factors and China?s impact on global growth

After a recent increase in Chinese import competition, European firms increased innovation. We present and rationalise these patterns using `trapped factors? at the micro level within a stylised equilibrium model of prod...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Where is the land of hope and glory?

Children?s chances of doing well at school, going to university, getting a good job and owning a house are strongly influenced by their parents? education, occupation and home ownership ? but what about the impact of whe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The long shadow of slavery: the persistence of slave owners in Southern law-making

This paper documents the persistence of the Southern slave owning elite in political power after the end of the American Civil War. We draw on a database of Texan state legislators between 1860 and 1900 and link them to ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Family background and the responses to higher SAT scores

Using discontinuities within the Swedish SAT system, we show that additional admission opportunities causally affect college choices. Students with high-educated parents change timing, colleges, and fields in ways that a...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The cost of being young: measuring intergenerational consumer prices

The UK's young adults are navigating a very different economic landscape to earlier generations, including low real wage growth, lower likelihood of owning their own home and the uncertain prospects of Brexit. Rahat Sidd...Read more...

Journal article

Labour Economics:

Intergenerational effects of employment protection reforms

Job insecurity has worsened in most OECD countries in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using Labour Force Survey data, I estimate the link between parental job insecurity (as measured by the contract type held by pa...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Regional Science:

Direct democracy and intergenerational conflicts in ageing societies

To evaluate the potential effects of population ageing on the outcomes of direct democracy, we analyze the effect of age on voting decisions in public referendums. In a case study of the Stuttgart 21 referendum on one of...Read more...

CEP election analysis

Social mobility

Debates over how to improve life prospects for people irrespective of their family background promise to be a key theme in the run-up to the 2019 General Election. This briefing summarises evidence on social mobility fro...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Generation gap: young Brits less likely to 'do better' than their parents

Doing better financially than your parents is an important marker of success, and for much of the last half century, real earnings growth in the UK was strong enough that most young people achieved this milestone. But re...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Why does birthplace matter so much?

We consider the link between birthplace and wages. Using a unique panel dataset, we estimate a raw elasticity of wages with respect to birthplace size of 4.2%, two thirds of the 6.8% raw elasticity with respect to city s...Read more...

Journal article

IZA World of Labor:

Intergenerational income persistence

A strong association between incomes across generations?with children from poor families likely to be poor as adults?is frequently considered an indicator of insufficient equality of opportunity. Studies of such ?interge...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Where is the Land of Hope and Glory? The geography of intergenerational mobility in England and Wales

Does the importance of your family background on how far you get in adulthood also depend on where you grow up? For England and Wales, a paucity of data has made this a difficult question to reliably answer. This paper p...Read more...

Government consultation

Intergenerational Fairness and Provision Committee

Intergenerational fairness is an increasingly pressing concern for both policy makers and the public. It is exacerbated by an ageing population, the global financial crisis and successive government policies that have fa...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Locus of control and its intergenerational implications for early childhood skill formation

This article builds upon Cunha's (2015) subjective rationality model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on their children's early skill formation. We propose that this subjecti...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Home ownership and social mobility

There is much talk about the difficulties that many young people in Britain face in trying to acquire their first home. Research by Jo Blanden and Stephen Machin explores the links between home ownership and social mobil...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Is modern technology responsible for jobless recoveries?

Since the early 1990s, recoveries from recessions in the US have been plagued by weak employment growth. We investigate whether a similar problem afflicts other developed economies, and whether technology is a culprit. W...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Home ownership and social mobility

This paper extends the literature on social mobility to investigate intergenerational links in home ownership, an important marker of wealth. Repeated cross sectional data show that home ownership rates have fallen rapid...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Early, late or never? When does parental education impact child outcomes?

We study the intergenerational effects of parents? education on their children?s educational outcomes. The endogeneity of parental education is addressed by exploiting the exogenous shift in education levels induced by t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Intergenerational persistence in income and social class: the impact of within-group inequality

Family income is found to be more closely related to sons? earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared to one born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast to the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Cautionary Note on Using Industry Affiliation to Predict Income

Many literatures investigate the causal impact of income on economic outcomes, for example in the context of intergenerational transmission or well-being and health. Some studies have proposed to use employer wage differ...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

How Much Can We Learn from International Comparisons of Intergenerational Mobility?

This paper summarises research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility ? whether classified by income, social class, social status or education ? considering observations from 65 countries. With the exception...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Parents' Basic Skills and Childrens' Cognitive Outcomes

The main aim of this paper is to assess how parents? literacy and numeracy affect the cognitive skill of their children. The data used are from the British Cohort Survey (BCS) which provides in 2004 basic skill assessmen...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Intergenerational Mobility and Assortative Mating: Effects of an Educational Reform

This paper provides new evidence on the role of the educational system for intergenerational mobility. I evaluate an educational reform, implemented in Sweden in the 1950s and 60s, which postponed tracking and extended c...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Accounting for Intergenerational Income Persistence: Non-Cognitive Skills, Ability and Education

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

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

In this paper we investigate whether young people whose fathers are union members are themselves more likely to join a union. The work builds upon a large social science literature on intergenerational mobility that, to ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Changes in intergenerational mobility in Britain

This paper compares and contrasts estimates of the extent of intergenerational income mobility over time in Britain. Estimates based on two British birth cohorts show that mobility appears to have fallen in a cross-cohor...Read more...