Intergenerational and Occupational Mobility

This thesis is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter provides an analysis of intergenerational mobility across countries, across cohorts and over the income distribution. It compares the patterns of intergenerational income mobility between fathers and sons in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. Among other findings, the analysis highlights that mobility is lowest for families at the extremes of the income distribution. Among university graduates, mobility is still lowest at the top. This calls for further research on the drivers of intergenerational mobility. The second chapter investigates why intergenerational earnings mobility is lowest at the top and at the bottom, by exploring the role of social networks. The implications of a simple model are tested on data from the United Kingdom. The inverse U-shaped mobility patterns are explained in two steps. First, a range of findings is consistent with the hypothesis that family friends affect the offspring’s educational and occupational choices. Second, the friend’s job is correlated to the parent’s job, in different ways at different income levels. Specifically, the richest and the poorest parents tend to have friends that are more similar to them than median parents. The third chapter examines the effects of job polarization on individuals and households by assessing the roles of occupational mobility, changes in occupational wage premia, mating patterns across occupations and female labour supply. The paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to examine the UK over 1991-2008. The findings suggest that most of the factors listed above have important roles. The period is characterised by pronounced movements in occupational premia and important roles for occupational mobility and assortative matching.