Economic Mobility Under Pressure

Based on complete population data, with the exact same de nitions of family class background and economic outcomes for a large number of birth cohorts, we examine post-war trends in intergenerational economic mobility in Norway. Standard summary statistics indicate stable or mildly declining rank-rank mobility for sons and sharply declining mobility for daughters. The most conspicuous trend in the mobility patterns is that men and women born into the lowest parts of the parental earnings distribution have fallen behind in terms of own earnings rank, as well as a number of other quality-of-life indicators. A considerable part of this development can be explained by changes in the class distribution of educational attainment and in its rising in uence on earnings rank. We argue that while the educational revolution has diminished the role of inherited ability, it has enlarged the in uence of the family as provider of a social learning environment. (JEL: J62, D63, J24) The editor in charge of this paper was Paola Giuliano. Acknowledgments: This paper is a strongly revised version of our previous working paper entitled “Egalitarianism under Pressure Toward Lower Economic Mobility in the Knowledge Economy?” (Markussen and Red, 2017). The research has received support from the Norwegian Research council (grant # 236992). Administrative registers made available by Statistics Norway have been essential. Data on ability scores have been obtained by consent from the Norwegian Armed Forces, who are not responsible for any of the ndings and conclusions reported in the paper. We wish to thank three anonymous referees and the Editor for valuable comments and suggestions. E-mail: simen.markussen@frisch.uio.no (Markussen); knut.roed@frisch.uio.no (Red) Journal of the European Economic Association Preprint prepared on 11 July 2019 using jeea.cls v1.0.