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Moving Towards Estimating Sons' Lifetime Intergenerational Economic Mobility in the UK
Author(s) -
Gregg Paul,
Macmillan Lindsey,
Vittori Claudia
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
oxford bulletin of economics and statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.131
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0084
pISSN - 0305-9049
DOI - 10.1111/obes.12146
Subject(s) - earnings , economics , selection bias , national child development study , sample (material) , demographic economics , social mobility , econometrics , estimation , residual , work (physics) , point (geometry) , cohort effect , cohort , cohort study , statistics , millennium cohort study (united states) , sociology , computer science , mathematics , mechanical engineering , social science , chemistry , geometry , accounting , management , chromatography , algorithm , engineering
Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility that use point in time measures of income and earnings suffer from lifecycle and attenuation bias. They also suffer from sample selection issues and further bias driven by spells out of work. We consider these issues together for UK data, the National Child Development Study and British Cohort Study, for the first time. When all three biases are considered, our best estimate of lifetime intergenerational economic persistence in the UK is 0.43 for children born in 1970. Whilst we argue that this is the best available estimate to date, we discuss why there is good reason to believe that this is still a lower bound, owing to residual attenuation bias.