Using data covering a single cohort’s first 55 years of life, we show that most of the intergenerational elasticity of earnings (IGE) is explained by differences in: years of schooling, cognitive skills, investments of parental time and school quality, and family circumstances during...

Using a digitized sample of thousands of essays written by 11-year-olds in 1969, we construct an index which measures the extent to which girls’ imagined futures conform to gender norms in Britain at the time. We link this index to outcomes over the life-cycle. Conditional on a large set of...

How do education, skills, investments of parental time and school quality, and family circumstances during childhood contribute to the persistence of earnings across generations? Building on a classic literature in sociology and a more recent literature in economics, our model allows each of the...

Childcare costs are often viewed as one of the biggest barriers to work, particularly among lone parents on low incomes. Children in England are typically eligible to start school - and thus access a number of hours of free public education - on 1 September after they turn four. This means that...

We investigate the relationship between child socio-emotional skills and labour market outcomes using longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. We perform a novel factor analysis of child skills and capture four latent dimensions, representing "attention", "conduct", "emotional", and...

Childcare costs are often viewed as one of the biggest barriers to work, particularly among lone parents on low incomes. Children in England are typically eligible to start school - and thus access a number of hours of free public education - on 1 September after they turn four. This means that...

Over the past 20 years the incidence of relative poverty among Britain's children has tripled. These changes are related to increased earnings inequality, growth in the number of single (lone) parent households, and an increased share of households with children with no working adult. The Labour...