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This paper examines the sources of differences in social mobility between the US and Denmark. Measured by income mobility, Denmark is a more mobile society, but not when measured by educational mobility. There are pronounced non-linearities in income and educational mobility in both countries. Greater Danish income mobility is largely a consequence of redistributional tax, transfer, and wage compression policies. While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, they do not translate into more favorable educational outcomes, partly because of disincentives to acquire education arising from the redistributional policies that increase income mobility.

A central concern about immigration is the integration into the labour market, not only of the first generation but also of subsequent generations. Little comparative work exists for Europe's largest economies. France, Germany and the UK have all become, perhaps unwittingly, countries with large immigrant populations albeit with very different ethnic compositions. Today, the descendants of these immigrants live and work in their parents' destination countries. This article presents and discusses comparative evidence on the performance of first and second-generation immigrants in these countries in terms of education, earnings and employment.

Previous studies have found that intergenerational income persistence is relatively high in the United States and Britain, especially as compared to Nordic countries. We compare the association between family income and sons' earnings in the United States (National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979), Britain (British Cohort Study 1970), and Sweden (Population Register Data, 1965 cohort), and find that both income elasticities and rank-order correlations are highest in the United States, followed by Britain, with Sweden being clearly more equal. We ask whether differences in educational inequality and in return to qualifications can explain these cross-country differences. Surprisingly, we find that this is not the case, even though returns to education are higher in the United States. Instead, the low income mobility in the United States and Britain is almost entirely due to the part of the parent-son association that is not mediated by educational attainment. In the United States and especially Britain, parental income is far more important for earnings at a given level of education than in Sweden, a result that holds also when controlling for cognitive ability. This goes against widespread ideas of the United States as a country where the role of ascription is limited and meritocratic stratification prevails.

There is an ongoing debate in the field of social mobility research about whether intergenerational social mobility can be increased by way of education policy. However, evidence on the effects of specific education policies on social mobility continues to be scarce. This article analyses the effect of one specific policy reform, the extension of compulsory schooling in Germany, which has been argued to have led to a decrease in educational inequality and an increase in social mobility. Using a difference-in-difference design, the article exploits the variation in the timing of the reform across German states to estimate the reform effect on the educational attainment and labour market chances of individuals from different social class backgrounds. We find that the reform resulted in a substantial narrowing of the gap in educational attainment between different social origin groups. This decline in educational inequality further translated into a reduction in the inequality in labour market chances between people from different social class backgrounds, thus increasing intergenerational social mobility. Our findings suggest that educational policy can lead to substantial increases in intergenerational social mobility, which may have been overlooked in past research on societal-level, long-run trends in social mobility.

This article reviews the recent evidence on US immigration, focusing on two key questions: (1) Does immigration reduce the labour market opportunities of less skilled natives? (2) Have immigrants who arrived after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act been successfully assimilated? Overall, evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant. On the question of assimilation, the success of the US-born children of immigrants is a key yardstick. By this metric, post-1965 immigrants are doing reasonably well. Even children of the least educated immigrant origin groups have closed most of the education gap with the children of natives.

Using the 1995—2011 March Current Population Survey and 1970—2000 Census data, we find that the fertility, education, and labor supply of second-generation women (US-born women with at least one foreign-born parent) are significantly positively affected by the immigrant generation's levels of these variables, with the effect of the fertility and labor supply of women from the mother's source country generally larger than that of women from the father's source country and the effect of the education of men from the father's source country larger than that of women from the mother's source country. We present some evidence that suggests our findings for fertility and labor supply are due at least in part to intergenerational transmission of gender roles. Transmission rates for immigrant fertility and labor supply between generations are higher than for education, but there is considerable intergenerational assimilation toward native levels for all three of these outcomes.

\"Research has repeatedly shown that educational opportunities are distributed unevenly in all countries. Therefore, the question is not whether family background and educational outcomes are related but to what degree they are related. This latter question then invites a comparative perspective. That is, does social inequality in education differ across time and countries? If yes, which institutional characteristics can explain differences in educational inequality? Educational inequality is conceptualized as the association between individuals' and their parents' highest educational level attained. Intergenerational educational mobility processes are analysed for 20 industrialized nations by means of log-linear and log-multiplicative models. The results show that the degree of educational mobility has remained stable across the second half of the 20th century in virtually all countries. However, nations differ widely in the extent to which parents' education influences their children's educational attainment. The degree of educational inequality is associated with the institutional structure of national education systems. Rigid systems with dead-end educational pathways appear to be a hindrance to the equalization of educational opportunities, especially if the sorting of students occurs early in the educational career. This association is not mediated by other institutional characteristics included in this analysis that do not exert notable influences on educational mobility.\" Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Sekundäranalyse; Querschnitt; Längsschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1994 bis 1998. (author's abstract, IAB-Doku).

In standard approaches to the political economy of inequality, the income distribution and the preferences of households are taken as fixed when studying how incomes are determined within and between nations. This paper makes the income distribution endogenous by supposing that aspirational parents can socialize children into having aspirational preferences which are modelled as a reference point in income space. The model looks at the endogenous determination of the level of income, income inequality and income redistribution where the proportion of aspirational individuals evolves endogenously according to pay-offs along the equilibrium path. The paper discusses implications of the model for intergenerational mobility. It also shows how the income generation process is critical for the dynamics and welfare conclusions. Finally, it looks at some evidence from the World Values Survey in light of the theory.

Recent empirical evidence from the United States indicates a high degree of persistence in earnings across generations. Designing effective public policies to increase social mobility requires identifying and measuring the major sources of persistence and inequality in earnings. We provide a quantitative model of intergenerational human capital transmission that focuses on three sources: innate ability, early education, and college education. We find that approximately one-half of the intergenerational correlation in earnings is accounted for by parental investment in education, in particular early education. We show that these results have important implications for education policy.