Lifetime Economic Technology: Understanding Mobility Across and Within Generations

This research intends to bring significant new insights to measuring how mobile our society actually is. Drawing together the currently distinct literatures on mobility within and across generations, it will apply methodological advancements made in one literature to the other and seek to expand on these advancements. The proposed project intends to develop a picture of lifetime economic mobility in the UK and to document the extent of biases that arise from estimates of mobility driven by using data at a single age, as noted in the international intergenerational literature. The project team will then apply recent advances in the methodology from research on intra-generational earnings mobility to the intergenerational literature to explore the role of multiple domains of intergenerational transmissions, such as education, occupation, health and well-being, in an integrated framework. Finally the research will unite the intergenerational and intra-generational literatures for the first time to reconcile contrasting findings that have emerged recently. This step advance in our understanding of intergenerational economic mobility will be of substantial benefit to policy makers as it seeks to improve equality of opportunity in Britain.