1. In the academic research arena, a lot of attention has been placed on how to use statistical modelling to obtain estimates of beta that are free from various biases. A careful discussion of these issues is contained in G. Solon (1999), ‘Intergenerational Mobility in the Labor Market’ in O. Ashenfelter and D. Card (eds.), Handbook of Labor Economics, North Holland Press.
2. http://cep.lse.ac.uk/about/news/IntergenerationalMobility.pdf. The underlying research was published as: J. Blanden, A. Goodman, P. Gregg and S. Machin (2004), ‘Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain’ in M. Corak (ed.) Generational Income Mobility, Cambridge University Press.
3. Sunday Times, 26 July 2009.
4. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/social-mobility-and-child-poverty-commission.
5. HM Government, ‘Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers’; https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/61964/opening-doors-breaking-barriers.pdf.
6. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/622214/Time_for_Change_report_-_An_assessement_of_government_policies_on_social_mobility_1997-2017.pdf.
7. For international comparisons, see J. Blanden, (2013), ‘Cross-national Rankings of Intergenerational Mobility: A comparison of approaches from economics and sociology’, Journal of Economic Surveys 27, 38–73; M. Corak (2013), ‘Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, 79–102; O. Causa and A. Johansson (2010), ‘Intergenerational Social Mobility’, OECD Economics Studies 2010, 1–44. For income mobility changes in Britain, see J. Blanden, P. Gregg and L. Macmillan (2007), ‘Accounting for Intergenerational Income Persistence: Noncognitive skills, ability and education’, Economic Journal 117, C43–C60; J. Blanden, P. Gregg and L. Macmillan (2013), ‘Intergenerational Persistence in Income and Social Class: The impact of within-group inequality’, Journal of Royal Statistical Society: Series A 176, 541–63.
8. OECD, ‘Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage: Mobility or Immobility across Generations? A review of the evidence for OECD countries’; http://www.oecd.org/els/38335410.pdf.
9. Numbers taken from Blanden (2011). UK number updated from J. Blanden and S. Machin (2017), ‘Home Ownership and Social Mobility’, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, Discussion Paper 1466.
10. This means if an adult earns £10,000 less than the average earnings for Britain as a whole, 35 per cent of this difference (£3,500) will be passed on to their children. In other words, the children will earn £3,500 less than the average for their own generation. In Denmark only 14 per cent of the relative difference is transmitted, on average, from one generation to the next. If a family earns £10,000 less than the average for their generation, their children will earn £1,400 less than the average.
11. See the methodological discussion of rank–rank correlations in M. Nybom and J. Stuhler (2016), ‘Biases in Standard Measures of Intergenerational Income Dependence’, Journal of Human Resources. Also see recent examples of evidence based on outcome ranks in population data from Denmark (S. Boserup, W. Kopzcuk and C. Kreiner (2013), ‘Intergenerational Wealth Mobility: Evidence from Danish wealth records of three generations’, unpublished paper, University of Copenhagen) and the United States (R. Chetty, N. Hendren, P. Kline and E. Saez (2014), ‘Where is the Land of Opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, 1553–1623).
12. Sutton Trust (2012), ‘The Social Mobility Summit’; http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/st-social-mobility-report.pdf.
13. Ibid.
14. See Chetty’s 2016 Lionel Robbins Lectures at the London School of Economics: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/events/event.asp?id=291; this includes the chart in Figure 5.
15. Canada – M. Corak and A. Heisz (1999), ‘The Intergenerational Earnings and Income Mobility of Canadian Men: Evidence from longitudinal income tax data’, Journal of Human Resources 34, 504–33; Denmark –Boserup, Kopzcuk and Kreiner (2013); Great Britain – our own calculations from data in Blanden and Machin (2017); United States – Chetty, Hendren, Kline and Saez (2014).
16. The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality; http://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/SOTU_2015_economic-mobility.pdf.
17. Alan Krueger, ‘The Rise and Consequences of Inequality’, speech on 12 January 2012; https://www.americanprogress.org/events/2012/01/12/17181/the-rise-and-consequences-of-inequality/
18. Interview with Alan Krueger, February 2017.
19. Numbers taken from Blanden (2013).
20. D. Andrew and A. Leigh (2009), ‘More Inequality, Less Social Mobility’, Applied Economics Letters 16, 1489–92.
21. R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett (2009), The Spirit Level, Penguin.
22. Interview with Alan Krueger.
23. Sutton Trust (2012), ‘The Social Mobility Summit’; http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/st-social-mobility-report.pdf.
24. Blanden and Machin (2017).
25. Ibid., based on calculations from the National Child Development Study (NCDS), which follows all individuals born in Britain in a week of March 1958 over time and the British Cohort Study (BCS), which follows all individuals born in Britain in a week of April 1970 over time. Children’s owner-occupation (as adults) is measured at age 42 in 2000 for NCDS and at age 42 in 2012 for BCS.
26. T. Piketty (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press.
27. R. Chetty et al. (2016), The Fading American Dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940, NBER Working Paper; http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/abs_mobility_summary.pdf.
28. L. Katz and A. Krueger (2017), ‘Documenting Decline in US Economic Mobility’, Science; https://d2ufo47lrtsv5s.cloudfront.net/content/early/2017/04/25/science.aan3264.full.