Intergenerational mobility and occupational status in Britain

Abstract

This paper examines the link between parents occupational attainment and that of their children. The existence of such a link implies dependence on inherited conditions and the stronger the link the less the potential for intergenerational mobility. The degree to which occupational mobility is influenced by parental achievements is investigated using data from the British Household Panel Survey. The evidence obtained suggests that individual attainment is strongly influenced by parental status. In particular, the occupational attainment of sons is found to depend significantly on the socioeconomic status of their fathers. The implication is that occupational mobility in 1990s Britain was still to some extent constrained by the achievements of the previous generation.

Intergenerational mobility and occupational status in Italy

“…On the other hand, having a non-working father is found to have a positive impact on the occupational status of women, but not men. In line with the findings of Carmichael (2000), it is found that mother's occupational status has much less impact on an offspring's achievement, when compared to the influence of father's occupation. Thus, in Tables 4 and 5 reporting of the marginal effects is limited to those associated with father's occupation as significance is found across all categories.…”

“…This study analyses data from the Bank of Italy's Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) and adopts the empirical approach of Carmichael (2000) who carried out her analysis on data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The empirical approach combines two methodologies, which have previously been used to measure the extent of intergenerational occupational mobility.…”

“…As was the case for , the higher is 2 , the lower is the degree of social mobility across generations. Following Carmichael's (2000) approach the achievement of one generation onto those of the previous generation is regressed in a probabilistic framework. More specifically, maximum likelihood methods are employed to estimate the probability that an individual i in generation t will achieve occupational status k given the occupational status of his or her parents in tÀ1 (controlling for individual characteristics).…”

Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility

“…Using slightly different methods, 59 The focus of this paper is on disentangling the reasons for the increase over time in the proportion of daughters in the same occupation as their father. Carmichael (2000), using the BHPS, and Di Pietro and Urwin (2003), using Italian data, find strong relationships between father and son occupations. 60 Ferrie (2005) demonstrates that occupational mobility in the U.S. was much greater in the late 19th century than in the 20th century.…”

Intergenerational transfers of public sector jobs: a shred of evidence on nepotism

“…Following the approach adopted by Carmichael (2000) and Chevalier (2002), we model the probability of children's following their father's occupation using individual characteristics (gender, age, education, marital status, region of residence, cohort dummies, and size of city dummies) as explanatory variables and introducing the father's occupational indicators to verify whether there is a statistically different propensity to follow one's father's employment relative to other occupational categories. The results of probit estimates using MLE are reported in Table 5 (marginal effects).…”