Intergenerational income mobility: New evidence from the UK

Using a new dataset combining the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and Understanding Society (UKHLS), this paper examines the current state of intergenerational income mobility in the UK. This extends previous evidence in several directions, with a focus on younger cohorts of individuals born between 1973 and 1992. I find evidence of considerable intergenerational persistence in the transmission of resources at the household level with an intergenerational elasticity of 0.26 and a rank coefficient of 0.30. This picture of mobility remains at the individual level and under a range of robustness tests that address traditional methodological concerns. While mobility is relatively low at the national level, I find meaningful differences in income mobility rates across the country. More generally, regions with lower income in the North of England display substantially lower levels of both relative and absolute income mobility than regions in the South.