Gregg, P;
Jonsson, JO;
Macmillan, L;
Mood, C;
(2017)
The Role of Education for Intergenerational Income Mobility: A comparison of the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden.
Social Forces
, 96
(1)
pp. 121-152.
10.1093/sf/sox051.
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Abstract
Previous studies have found that intergenerational income persistence is relatively high in the United States and Britain, especially as compared to Nordic countries. We compare the association between family income and sons’ earnings in the United States (National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979), Britain (British Cohort Study 1970), and Sweden (Population Register Data, 1965 cohort), and find that both income elasticities and rank-order correlations are highest in the United States, followed by Britain, with Sweden being clearly more equal. We ask whether differences in educational inequality and in return to qualifications can explain these cross-country differences. Surprisingly, we find that this is not the case, even though returns to education are higher in the United States. Instead, the low income mobility in the United States and Britain is almost entirely due to the part of the parent-son association that is not mediated by educational attainment. In the United States and especially Britain, parental income is far more important for earnings at a given level of education than in Sweden, a result that holds also when controlling for cognitive ability. This goes against widespread ideas of the United States as a country where the role of ascription is limited and meritocratic stratification prevails.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Role of Education for Intergenerational Income Mobility: A comparison of the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/sf/sox051 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sox051 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence, which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Learning and Leadership UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Learning and Leadership > Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10041223 |
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