Featured Graduate Student Research: Jack Blundell

There is copious evidence showing that life chances are affected by family background. Children whose parents went to university are themselves more likely to do so, they are more likely to be higher earners if their parents were, and it is the same story for home ownership. What is far less clear, and for which there is almost no evidence for the UK, is whether the role of family background is attenuated or enhanced by the locality in which you grow up. In other words, is the link between child and parental university attendance the same in Liverpool as in Lambeth? If you father was a low-skilled worker does the probability that you become a high-skilled professional depend on whether you grew up in Oldham or Oxford? Such questions are both intrinsically interesting for academic research and at the same time crucial for policy.

With the support of The Europe Center grant, I travelled to London to work with unique longitudinally-linked census data at the UK Office for National Statistics. Using this large and detailed dataset, I was able to match children to their parents, then to follow up these children into adulthood and observe later life outcomes. I was then able to estimate the association between parents and children in home ownership, education and occupation. Crucially, the large size of the dataset allowed me to reliably estimate how this association varies across areas. My research team’s results represent the most detailed-yet investigation into geographical differences in intergenerational mobility in the UK.

Our main analysis points to there being very substantial differences in the levels of mobility across England and Wales. Consider the cohort born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. For this group, the probability that the child obtains a university degree if at least one of their parents had a degree was 79%, compared to 35% if neither parent had a degree. This is an attainment gap of 44% percentage points. But this gap ranged from 42% in the South East of England to 48% in Yorkshire and Humberside. At the even more granulated level, this attainment gap falls to 37% in Kent but is 53% in Inner East London.

Similarly, if we focus on the probability of moving from the bottom tercile of the occupation distribution (ranked according to median wages within occupations) to the top tercile in a generation, the national transition probability for the same cohort is 22%. But this is as high as 30% for those growing up in London and only 17% for those in Yorkshire and Humberside. Figure 1 shows an alternative measure of occupational mobility calculated at the NUTS2 geographical level on a map of England and Wales. In terms of home ownership, for those whose parents owned a home, the probability of home ownership is 31 percentage points higher than it is for those whose parents are not homeowners. This gap ranges from 25 percentage points in Wales to 38 percentage points in London.

Our data also allows us to test whether regional differences in mobility have increased over time. How has the dispersion of mobility changed over time across regions of England and Wales? Comparing the cohort born in the late 1950s and early 1960s to that born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we see that occupation-wage mobility gaps have widened, as have home ownership mobility gaps. The career prospects and chances of owning a home of those from different parental backgrounds for the latest cohort depends more on the region of birth than it did for those born in the mid 20th century. Regional education mobility gaps however have closed over this same time period.

While the existence of variation across geographical areas is interesting in its own right, the real value of producing such estimates is that it allows us to start considering the causes, and implications of variation in intergenerational mobility. While a thorough analysis of the mechanisms leading to different levels of mobility is outside of the realms of this work, we present correlations of our geographical estimates with several variables. Firstly, we demonstrate that the high occupation-wage mobility experienced by London is not part of a general trend of high mobility in cities. Whatever is driving the exceptional mobility of London is something particular about London rather than a broader urban-rural divide. Secondly, we show that occupation-wage mobility is lowest in ex-industrial and mining areas. Third, we demonstrate that home ownership mobility is related to house prices, such that areas with higher house prices have lower rates of home ownership mobility. Finally, we show that areas experiencing low occupation-wage mobility were more likely to vote to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum.

Thanks in part to the work of Professor Raj Chetty (formerly at Stanford) and co-authors, the link between parental background and later outcomes has risen to the forefront of public discussion in the US, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. My work in London has led to a paper which I am currently preparing for journal submission, and the work will represent a major part of my PhD dissertation. I have presented the research at Stanford and at an international conference on intergenerational mobility. Professor Chetty’s inspiring work on the topic was part of why I chose to do my PhD in Economics at Stanford, and the generous support of The Europe Center has enabled me to realize my goal of joining the research community in this field. I thank TEC for making this possible.

Figure 1. Occupational mobility, 1974-83 birth cohort

Notes: Darker green corresponds to higher rates of upward occupational mobility. Parents observed when children age 8-17, children observed age 28-37. Source: ONS Longitudinal Study.

 

Jack Blundell is a PhD candidate in Economics.