It is widely believed that countries with greater levels of income inequality also have lower levels of intergenerational mobility. This relationship, known as the Great Gatsby Curve (GGC), has been prominently cited by high-ranking public policy makers, best-selling authors and Nobel Prize...

A growing number of studies in several countries over the past twenty years have documented the persistence in incomes across generations, and much of the current literature is seeking to understand the processes driving intergenerational mobility and how these differ across time periods and...

Previous studies of intergenerational income mobility have typically focused at on estimating persistence across generations at the mean of the distribution of sons' earnings. Here, we use the relatively new unconditional quantile regression (UQR) technique to consider how the association...

We investigate the impact on earnings inequality of a selective education system in which school assignment is based on initial test scores. We use a large, representative household panel survey to compare adult earnings inequality of those growing up under a selective education system with...

Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility that use point in time measures of income and earnings suffer from lifecycle and attenuation bias. We consider these issues for the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and British Cohort Study (BCS) for the first time, highlighting how common...

Previous work has shown that there is a significant intergenerational correlation of worklessness for the UK which varies across local labour markets (Macmillan, 2011). Using a decomposition from the intergenerational mobility literature (Blanden et. al, 2007), this research is the first to...

There is currently a debate in policy circles about access to "the upper echelons of power" (Sir John Major, ex Prime Minister, 2013). This research seeks to understand the relationship between family background and early access to top occupations. We find that privately educated graduates are a...

By the time children leave primary school there is a large socio-economic gap in their reading proficiency. There are a number of potential explanations for this socio-economic gap and in this paper we investigate the role of three particular genes and gene-environment interactions in...

We show that children who are born at the weekend or just before are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children’s development for a sample of uncomplicated births from...

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are two highly respected studies of school pupils’ academic achievement. English policymakers have been disappointed with school children’s performance on these tests,...