Accounting for Intergenerational Income Persistence: Noncognitive Skills, Ability and Education

By Joanne Blanden, Paul Gregg, L. Macmillan. Social Science Research Network, 2006

558 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 BCS cohort and also to explore the decline in mobility in the UK between the 1958 NCDS cohort and the 1970 cohort. The mediating factors considered are cognitive skills, noncognitive traits, educational attainment and labour market attachment. Changes in the relationships between these variables, parental income and earnings are able to explain over 80% of the rise in intergenerational persistence across the cohorts.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bfe3b291f4355bbc930036cdc9870426042fccbc

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Citations in the corpus

Persistent poverty and children's cognitive development: evidence from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (2016, methodology): “It has become increasingly apparent that there is a strong link between children’s development and educational attainment, and their family background (Blanden et al., 2007; Gregg and Macmillan, 2009).”
Understanding – and Misunderstanding – Social Mobility in Britain: The Entry of the Economists, the Confusion of Politicians and the Limits of Educational Policy (2013, background): “…later 1970s and, more specifically, with the fact that children from better-off families had benefited disproportionately from the expansion of higher education, from which increasing earnings returns were being obtained (Blanden et al., 2005a; cf. Blanden et al., 2007; Lindley and Machin, 2012).”
Do smart parents raise smart children? The intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities (2010, background): “Complementing the research on income and educational mobility, there is a small economic literature which examines whether it is the transmission of cognitive abilities that drives intergenerational correlation patterns (Agee and Crocker, 2002; Bowles and Gintis, 2002; Blanden et al., 2007; Black et”
Intergenerational Earnings Mobility: Changes across Cohorts in Britain (2008, methodology): “Summarizing, we do not find evidence for a trend in intergenerational mobility except for a negative trend for the most recent cohorts (1960–1972) that is in line with results in Blanden et al. (2004) and Blanden et al. (2007).”
The Intergenerational Transmission of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities (2010, unknown): “For example, in a small sample of US children Osborne-Groves (2005) finds that personality traits can explain 11 percent of the earnings transmission, the same number as Blanden et al. (2007) find in a study of 3300 UK children using a measure of non-cognitive skills. Hirvonen (2009) finds that a co”
Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility (2010, background): “Even more recently, work by Blanden, Gregg, and Macmillan (2007) examines the role of non-cognitive skills and ability for intergenerational income persistence in Britain.”
Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and the Role of Inheritance: Evidence from Multiple Generations (2018, background): “: It is clearly larger than the ones reported for Denmark in Boserup et al. (2014) and for Norway in Fagereng et al.”
The Non-Cognitive Returns to Class Size (2008, unknown): “Using British data, Blanden, Gregg, and Macmillan (2007) found that non-cognitive measures such as teacher rep orts of student effort appear to influence labor market outcomes but do so largely through their effects on educational outcomes.”