Intergenerational Earnings Mobility: Changes across Cohorts in Britain

Abstract The aim of this paper is to analyze 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. We combine information from the two samples using the two-sample two-stage least squares estimator described by Arellano and Meghir (1992). Our main result shows that intergenerational earnings mobility was stable for the cohorts born between 1950 and 1960 and decreased statistically significantly among more recent cohorts, those born during 1961–1972.