The rapid widening of wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding whether and separately the rate at which individuals accumulate particular types of wealth by family background is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show offspring wealth inequality is driven by housing wealth, and holding such wealth is becoming increasingly associated with early life circumstances relating to parental housing tenure and education, even after controlling for adult offspring’s own characteristics. Importantly, we find adult offspring whose parents hold a degree and are homeowners are no less likely to report homeownership and housing wealth compared to older cohorts from the same background. Our findings infer the intergenerational rank correlation in housing wealth is set to double in approximately three decades.

This article investigates how class of origin and intergenerational social mobility impact left-wing party support among new and old core left-wing electorates in the context of post-industrial electoral realignment and occupational transformation. We investigate the remaining legacy of political socialization in class of origin across generations of voters in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. We demonstrate that part of the contemporary middle-class left-wing support is a legacy of socialization under industrial class–party alignments, as many individuals from working-class backgrounds – traditional left-wing constituencies – have a different (post-industrial) class location than their parents. These enduring effects of production worker roots are weaker among younger generations and in more realigned contexts. Our findings imply that exclusively considering respondents' destination class underestimates the relevance of political socialization in class of origin, thereby overestimating electoral realignment. However, these past industrial alignments are currently unparalleled, as newer left-wing constituencies do not (yet) demonstrate similar legacies.

Turner Station, Maryland, is a century-old African American neighborhood just east of Baltimore that housed the families of workers who were employed at a nearby steel plant from the founding of the community in the early 1900s until the plant closed in 2012. Its story provides a window into the lives of the understudied Black working-class during the peak decades of industrial employment and the ensuing decades of decline. Long-time residents recall a vibrant, self-sufficient community with a heterogeneous class structure, produced in part by residential restrictions and employment discrimination that constrained professionals such as physicians and teachers to reside and to practice or work in the neighborhood. They report a high level of collective efficacy and joint responsibility for childrearing. Current and former residents describe a strong emphasis on education as a means of upward mobility. As levels of education rose and residential opportunities opened, the children of the mid-century steelworkers left Turner Station for other communities in the metropolitan area and beyond. As out migration continued, the community suffered a decline: virtually all of the businesses are gone, vacant homes are common, and a more transient population has moved in. The members of the Turner Station diaspora still cherish the memory of the neighborhood, even as many have moved on and up. Their achievements show what happened when a generation of African Americans were given access to decent-paying jobs that did not require a college education—a degree of access that no longer exists because of the decline of industrial employment in the Baltimore region and elsewhere.

We study a model in which parents care about the economic and social status of their offspring. The chances of an individual achieving social status depends on innate traits, that is, IQ, ability, social and cultural environment, and other price-insensitive endowments, passed on by their parents, on human capital investments and on chance events. Parents can, through human capital investments, increase the offspring’s probability of climbing the social ladder, although they cannot borrow against the children’s perspective earning. Consequently, income and trait heterogeneity are the determinants of unequal opportunities and of intergenerational mobility.

We build a model that, according to the empirical evidence, gives rise to oscillations in wealth within a dynasty while keeping intergenerational persistence in education attainment. We propose a mechanism based on the interaction between wealth and effort as suggested by the Carnegie conjecture, according to which wealthier individuals devote less effort in their job occupations than poorer. Oscillations in wealth arise from changes in the occupation chosen by different generations of the same dynasty as a response to both inherited wealth and college premium. Our mechanism generates a rich social stratification with several classes in the long run due to the combination of different levels of education and occupation types. Furthermore, we generate a large mobility in wealth among classes even in the long run. Our model highlights the role played by the minimum cost on education investment, the borrowing constraints, and the complementarity between education and occupational effort.

This article explores the association between intergenerational social mobility and attitudes towards income differences in post-socialist societies. I hypothesise that based on the psychological mechanism of self-serving bias in causal attribution, those who experience upward social mobility are more likely to support greater income differences, and that subjective intergenerational mobility has stronger association with attitudes towards income differences than objective mobility because individuals filter their objective environment in order to derive their subjective perceptions of the world and their own experiences. The described hypotheses are tested with two cross-national data sets – European Values Studies and Life in Transition Survey. The derived findings are robust to alternative statistical specifications and indicate that individuals who perceive themselves as subjectively mobile have significantly different attitudes towards income differences in comparison to non-mobile groups, but that this effect does not manifest among objectively mobile individuals.

Intergenerational mobility—the association between parents’ and adult children’s economic wellbeing—is an important sociological concept because it provides information about inequality of opportunity in society, and it has gained relevance in the recent past due to the increase economic inequality in most of the affluent world. This article provides an overview of the different measures of mobility used by sociologists and economists, as well as main empirical findings about mobility. I then move to topics that push mobility analysis beyond its bivariate focus: The association between intergenerational mobility and economic inequality, the mechanisms for mobility, and the validity of mobility as a measure of inequality of opportunity. I suggest that the association between mobility and inequality is likely spurious, driven by varying institutional arrangements across countries, and that mobility analysis is most useful when focused on describing the bivariate intergenerational association across countries and over time.

How well do parents’ education, earnings, income, and wealth predict the same outcomes for their children? Scientists have been trying to answer this question for a long time. Francis Galton (1822–1911) was the first to apply statistical methods to tackle this question. Centuries earlier, the great Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) famously observed that the prestige lasted at best four generations in one lineage.

This article seeks evidence on trends in intergenerational income for cohorts born after 1970. As many of these cohorts have not yet joined the labour market, we must look at relationships between intermediate outcomes (degree attainment, test scores and non-cognitive abilities) and parental income to forecast forward from these to estimates of intergenerational earnings correlations. We find no evidence that the relationship between these intermediate outcomes and parental income have changed for more recent cohorts. Evidence from the earlier 1958 and 1970 cohorts shows that as mobility declined in the past the relationship between intermediate outcomes and parental income strengthened. We therefore conclude that, under realistic assumptions and in the absence of any significant unanticipated changes, the decline in intergenerational mobility that occurred between 1958 and 1970 birth cohorts is unlikely to continue for cohorts born from 1970 to 2000. Mobility is therefore likely to remain at or near the relatively low level observed for the 1970 birth cohort.

How do taxes affect human capital accumulation? This question has been studied extensively in the context of two model classes: overlapping generations (OLG) and infinite horizon (IH). These embody very different assumptions about the intergenerational transmission of physical and human capital. This paper investigates how such differences in intercohort persistence affect the responsiveness of human capital to taxation. A model is developed that nests OLG and IH models as special cases. The steady-state and transitional effects of tax changes are computed for varying degrees of persistence. The main finding is that stronger intercohort persistence magnifies the impact of taxation on human capital and leads to slower transitional dynamics. As a result, IH models generate systematically larger tax effects than OLG models. For the tax experiments studied here, models with complete persistence generate steady-state tax elasticities at least two times larger and transitional half-lives at least three times longer than do models without persistence.

Trends in absolute rates of both career and intergenerational mobility in Britain since the 1950s are outlined and some of the cultural consequences of the resulting heterogeneity in class composition are briefly considered. It is argued that while supply-side factors – educational attainment, ability, etc. – may determine who has been mobile or not, aggregate rates and changes in aggregate rates are largely dictated by demand-side factors. But current trends in the composition of the working population are necessarily self-limiting. A forecast of the occupational structure in the first half of the twenty-first century together with the assumption of some continuity in the pattern of class advantages, indicates a ‘mobility transition’ in which trends are likely to reverse within the next thirty years or so. The long-run replacement of recruitment heterogeneity by homogeneity of social experience in the enlarged middle class suggests that, in contrast with present-day pluralism, there will emerge the structural conditions for a greater cultural uniformity and the onset of an era of orthodoxy.