Like (grand)parent, like child? Multigenerational mobility across the EU

Abstract

Abstract This study shows that the multigenerational transmission of inequality in most of the 28 EU countries is higher than what a parent-to-child paradigm would suggest. While a strand of the literature claims that this is due to a direct grandparental effect, economic historian Gregory Clark argues that multigenerational mobility follows a Markovian process. In his view, not only are previous estimates (severely) attenuated by an errors-in-variables problem, but persistence is also constant across time and space. Using a unique retrospective survey containing information on three generations of European citizens, we provide suggestive evidence against such a “universal law of mobility”. While estimates based on measurement error models show that persistence is indeed as strong as Clark suggests, there are cross-country differences. Furthermore, for a few EU countries, we cannot reject the hypothesis of a direct grandparental effect. Overall, there is no single data-generating process to describe multigenerational persistence that fits all EU countries. 2