Social Mobility within and across Generations in Britain since 1851

This paper exploits a rich data source to provide new measures of social mobility in England and Wales from 1851 to 1901. Existing measures of intergenerational mobility derived from marriage registries fail to control for life-cycle differences between father and son. Correcting for this reveals significantly more mobility across generations than previous estimates: half of all sons occupy a different occupational class than their father, and upward mobility exceeds downward by 40 percent. In addition, the rate of intragenerational mobility is measured for the first time. While slightly lower than mobility across generations, it is substantial; 44 percent of young males changed occupational class over a thirty-year period. International and intertemporal comparisons show that mobility in Britain was much lower than in the U.S., but that unlike in the U.S., it trended upward from the 1850s to the 1970s.