Intergenerational earnings mobility: Changes across cohorts in Britain

The aim of this paper is to analyse intergenerational earnings mobility in Britain for cohorts of sons born between 1950 and 1972. Since there are no British surveys with information on both sons and their fathers’ earnings covering the above period, we consider two separate samples from the British Household Panel Survey: a first sample containing information on sons’ earnings and a set of occupational and education characteristics of their fathers and a second one with data on the same set of fathers’ characteristics and their earnings. We combine information from the two samples by using the two-sample two-stage least square estimator described by Arellano and Meghir (1992) and Ridder and Moffit (2005). * We thank Jo Blanden, Marco Francesconi, Jonathan Gershuny and Stephen Jenkins for their valuable comments. The financial support of the Economic and Social Research Council under the “Intergenerational mobility in Britain: Does sample selection matter?” Award No. RES-000-23-0185 is gratefully acknowledged.