Lifetime Economic Mobility:Understanding mobility within and across generations

代际社会经济流动性在过去十年中重新成为学术，媒体和政治话语中的关键问题之一，这是根据学术研究，包括申请人的贡献，表明英国的流动性如何下降。尽管这种突出的上升，研究代际流动性仍然是，在许多方面，在其婴儿期。这项提议旨在为这一证据基础增加三项新的主要产出，并引入一个相关领域产生的新方法。提案的第一部分直接提出了“我们的社会有多移动的？“解决在数据有限的情况下准确衡量代际流动性的问题。在衡量跨代流动性时，我们最好捕捉终身流动性，观察老一代的整个童年和年轻一代的整个成年生活。这些苛刻的要求意味着，理想的数据是不完全可用的，在英国和流动性的估计是基于在时间点的措施。这种时间点的估计将在三个重要方面不同于一生的情况。以前的文献已经确定了其中两个问题：测量误差和生命周期偏差。迄今为止，这些问题在英国受到的关注有限。另一个在文献中尚未考虑的衡量问题是，收入只有在人们工作时才被衡量。因此，我们只衡量就业者的流动性。如果我们试图衡量一个人的终身收入，失业时间将是重要的，并可能改变我们对流动模式的理解，因为失业在贫困背景的人中更为常见。因此，这项新工作将在英国首次对我们的社会实际上有多移动的做出可靠的估计。考虑到我们已经知道的数据中可能存在的偏见，我们预计会发现英国的移动的程度远远低于之前承认的。第二个研究领域涉及到迄今为止在理解代际传递的其他领域，如教育、阶级和失业与代际收入流动性的关系方面取得的有限进展。我们将从收入流动性的相关领域引入一种新的方法论方法，该方法在评估流动性模式如何在一个人的出身的不同维度之间相互关联方面有了重大改进。这项技术也使我们能够考虑在童年时期的家庭收入分配中，这些领域的流动性实际上发生在哪里。这提供了一个步骤的进步，目前的文献可以提供在这一领域，并汇集了一些独立的领域到一个framework.Finally，我们将首次把两个密切相关的文献流动性内和跨代探索似乎是对比的结果。代内流动性文献发现，随着人们年龄的增长，最近一批人的收入流动性增加。相反，代际流动文献记录了这些人在家庭背景方面的流动性如何减少。我们将利用第二个研究项目中的方法学进步，在一个统一的框架中考虑这两种类型的流动性，描述这些明显相反的发现如何协同工作。这将是新的和翔实的工作，了解家庭背景如何不仅关系到以后的生活结果，但也不平等和流动性以后的生活。鉴于目前对这一主题领域的高度政治兴趣，我们相信这项研究不仅是学术文献的实质性进步，而且将在媒体和政策制定方面产生更广泛的影响。

Intergenerational socio-economic mobility has re-emerged as one of the key issues in academic, media and political discourse over the last decade, following from academic research, including contributions from the applicants, that showed how mobility had declined in the UK. Despite this rise in prominence, research into intergenerational mobility is still, in many ways, in its infancy. This proposal aims to add three major new outputs to this evidence base, bringing in a new methodology emerging from a related field. The first part of the proposal directly asks the question of 'How mobile is our society?' addressing concerns about the accurate measurement of intergenerational mobility in the face of data limitations. When measuring mobility across generations we would ideally capture life-time mobility, observing the older generation across their offspring's entire childhood and the younger generation across their entire adult lives. These demanding requirements mean that ideal data are not fully available in the UK and estimates of mobility are based on measures at points in time. Such point in time estimates will differ from a life-time picture in three important ways. Previous literature has identified two of these issues: measurement error and life-cycle bias. These issues have been given limited attention to date in the UK. An additional measurement problem, which has yet to be considered at all in the literature, stems from the fact that earnings is only measured when people are working. Therefore we only measure the mobility of the employed. If we are attempting to measure a person's life time earnings, periods of worklessness will be important and are likely to shift our understanding of patterns of mobility, as worklessness is more common among those from deprived backgrounds. This new work will therefore give, for the first time in the UK, a robust estimate of how mobile our society actually is. Given what we already know about the likely biases in the data, we expect to find that the UK is far less mobile than previously acknowledged. The second research area addresses the limited advancements that have been made to date in understanding how other domains of intergenerational transmissions, such as education, class and worklessness, relate to intergenerational income mobility. We will introduce a new methodological approach, from the related field of earnings mobility, which adds a significant improvement in the assessment of how patterns of mobility are related across different dimensions of a person's origin. This technique also enables us to consider where in the distribution of family income in childhood that mobility across these domains actually occurs. This offers a step-advancement on what the current literature can offer in this area and brings together a number of separate domains into one framework.Finally, we will bring together the two closely related literatures of mobility within and across generations for the first time to explore what appears to be contrasting findings. The intragenerational mobility literature has found evidence of increased earnings mobility as people age for a recent cohort of people. In contrast, the intergenerational mobility literature has documented how these people experienced less mobility in terms of their family background. We will use our methodological advancements from the second research project to consider both types of mobility in a consolidated framework, describing how these apparently contrasting findings can work together. This will be new and informative work for understanding how family background relates not only to later life outcomes but also to inequality and mobility later in life. Given the current high political interest in this subject area, we believe that this research will not just be a substantive advance on the academic literature but will have a substantial wider impact in the media and in policy development.