Lifetime Economic Mobility:Understanding mobility within and across generations

在过去十年里，代际社会经济流动性重新成为学术、媒体和政治话语中的关键问题之一，此前包括申请者的贡献在内的学术研究表明，英国的流动性是如何下降的。尽管这种知名度上升，但在许多方面，对代际流动性的研究仍处于初级阶段。这项提议的目的是在这一证据基础上增加三项主要的新产出，引入一个相关领域出现的新方法。提案的第一部分直接提出了这样一个问题：“我们的社会流动性如何？”解决在面临数据限制的情况下准确衡量代际流动性的问题。在衡量几代人之间的流动性时，我们理想的做法是捕捉一生的流动性，观察老一辈人整个童年时期的情况，观察年轻一代整个成年生活的情况。这些苛刻的要求意味着，理想的数据在英国并不完全可用，对流动性的估计是基于时间点的衡量标准。这样的时间点估计将在三个重要方面与终身图景有所不同。以前的文献已经确定了其中的两个问题：测量误差和生命周期偏差。到目前为止，这些问题在英国得到的关注有限。另一个尚未在文献中考虑的衡量问题源于这样一个事实，即收入只有在人们工作的时候才被衡量。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一生的收入，失业时期将是重要的，可能会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常见。因此，这项新工作将在英国第一次对我们的社会实际流动性做出强有力的估计。考虑到我们已经知道的数据中可能存在的偏差，我们预计会发现，英国的流动性远远低于之前承认的水平。第二个研究领域涉及迄今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之间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方法，这将大大改进对流动性模式在个人来源的不同维度之间的关系的评估。这项技术还使我们能够考虑在儿童时期的家庭收入分配中，跨越这些领域的流动实际上发生在哪里。这为当前文献在这一领域所能提供的东西提供了一个进步，并将一些不同的领域结合到一个框架中。最后，我们将第一次将两个密切相关的关于代内和跨代流动的文献放在一起，以探索似乎是相反的发现。代内流动性文献发现，随着最近一批人的年龄增长，收入流动性增加的证据。相比之下，代际流动性文献记录了这些人在家庭背景方面经历的流动性较低的情况。我们将使用我们在第二个研究项目中取得的方法进步，在一个统一的框架中考虑这两种类型的移动性，描述这些明显相反的发现如何协同工作。这将是一项新的、内容丰富的工作，有助于理解家庭背景不仅与以后的生活结果有关，而且与以后生活的不平等和流动性有关。鉴于当前对这一主题领域的高度政治兴趣，我们相信，这项研究不仅将是对学术文献的实质性进步，而且将对媒体和政策制定产生重大而广泛的影响。

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.