A New Cross-Country Investigation on the Patterns of Intergenerational Mobility

This research compares the patterns of intergenerational income mobility between fathers and sons in Germany, Italy, Great Britain and the United States. It is one of the few studies that investigates more than one dimension of mobility. It also proposes a new way to construct the mobility matrices, in order to control for the age at which income is measured. The results, based on the Two-Sample-Two-Stage methodology, indicate that Britain is, on average, more mobile (elasticity of 0.317 on the main sample), followed by Germany (0.437), Italy (0.463) and the United States (0.489). In Italy and Germany the elasticity is increasing and higher and for younger cohorts, whereas in the United States it seems constant over time. The elasticity rises in Britain as well, at a lower rate. At different income levels, the quantile regressions do not provide strong evidence in favour of a non-constant elasticity along the son's income distribution, except for Italy. The mobility matrices, however, where the son's and the father's income quantiles are both considered, indicate higher intergenerational persistence at the top and bottom quantiles, according to the country. Specifically, the mobility is lower at the bottom in Italy and Germany. It is lower at the top in Britain and the United States