Are children better off than their parents? This highly debated question in politics and economics is investigated by analysing the trends in absolute and relative intergenerational labour income mobility for Germany and the US. High quality panel data is used for this purpose; the SOEP for...

In this paper I investigate the causal relationship between labor market polarization and intergenerational mobility, two of the most important features of advanced labor markets in recent decades. The former relates to the disappearance of middle-wage routine jobs and the rise of both high- and...

Social mobility is a key element of meritocratic societies. We analyze multigenerational social mobility with a hand-collected yearly Swiss dataset from 1550 to 2019. With our surname-based approach, we measure the Swiss society's overall permeability over more than 450 years. Furthermore, we...

This paper analyzes the relationship between spatial mobility and social mobility. It develops a two-skill-type spatial equilibrium model of two regions with location preferences where each region consists of an urban area which is home to workplaces and residences and an exclusively residential...

It has been shown that a person's relative income - compared to a reference group - has a negative impact on self-reported happiness. This suggests that people who aim at increasing their happiness should try to find a better-paid job if their relative income is low. In this paper we study this...

A number of powerful forces have produced uneven opportunities for occupational advancement in Scotland. Edinburgh as capital of a devolved nation, hub for financial service activities and regional head office location for many public sector bodies boasts many of the characteristics that one...