Like (grand)parent, like child? Multigenerational mobility across the EU

This study shows that the multigenerational transmission of inequality in most of the 28 EU countries is higher than what a parent-to-child paradigm would suggest. While a strand of the literature claims that this is due to a direct grandparental effect, economic historian Gregory Clark argues that multigenerational mobility follows a Markovian process. In his view, not only are previous estimates (severely) attenuated by an errors-in-variables problem, but persistence is also constant across time and space. Using a unique retrospective survey containing information on three generations of European citizens, we provide suggestive evidence against such a “universal law of mobility”. While estimates based on measurement error models show that persistence is indeed as strong as Clark suggests, there are cross-country differences. Furthermore, for a few EU countries, we cannot reject the hypothesis of a direct grandparental effect. Overall, there is no single data-generating process to describe multigenerational persistence that fits all EU countries.

COLAGROSSI Marco;  D'HOMBRES Beatrice;  SCHNEPF Sylke; 

2020-11-23

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

JRC122649

0014-2921 (online),   

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292120302300,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC122649,   

10.1016/j.euroecorev.2020.103600 (online),