The main finding of Bukodi and Goldthorpe (2019), using social status based on occupation groupings, is that there have not been improvements nor any decline in relative intergenerational mobility in Britain since World War II in terms of social class. Notably, there has not been improvement in the mobility of children from working-class backgrounds relative to other background classes. Importantly, the authors argue strongly that education is not the key determinant of adult success in the labor market. Moreover, improving the educational attainment of children from poor socioeconomic backgrounds does not help improve their labor market performance. This suggests that policies to improve the mobility of children from poor social backgrounds should not include attempts to foster human capital or education policies in general.

Previous articleNext article Open AccessStill Flying. Reply to "Not a flying start after all?" by Lillebo, Markussen, Roed, ZhaoPedro Carneiro, Katrine Loken, and Kjell G. SalvanesPedro Carneiro, Katrine Loken, and Kjell G. SalvanesPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookxLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Political Economy Just Accepted Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/732220 PermissionsRequest permissions HistoryAccepted July 12, 2024 © 2024 The University of Chicago. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This article examines the economic impact of a tuberculosis control program launched in Norway in 1948. In the 1940s, Norway had one of the highest tuberculosis infection rates in Europe, affecting about 85% of the inhabitants. To lower the disease burden, the Norwegian government launched a large-scale tuberculosis testing and vaccination campaign that substantially reduced tuberculosis infection rates among children. We find that cohorts in school during and after the campaign in municipalities with high tuberculosis prevalence gained more in terms of education, earnings, longevity, and height following this public health intervention. Furthermore, the gains from the disease control program are not limited to the initially treated cohorts but also affect their children. The results also suggest that individuals from a low socioeconomic background benefited more from the intervention and we present new evidence that a narrowing of the gap in childhood health can lead to a reduction in socioeconomic inequalities in adulthood.

Increasing mother’s labor supply during a child’s preschool years may reduce time investments, yielding a negative direct effect on midchildhood and teenage outcomes. But as mother’s work hours increase, income will rise. Can income compensate for the negative effect of hours? Our mediation analysis exploits exogenous variation in both mother’s hours and family income. Results suggest a negative, insignificant direct effect from increasing mother’s hours on child test scores. However, the positive mediating effect of income creates a positive total effect on test scores (26% of a standard deviation) for a 10-hour increase in mother’s weekly hours in preschool years.

We study the migration behavior of displaced workers and find that job displacement increases regional mobility. We find, however, that noneconomic factors, such as family ties, are very important for the migration decision and that there is strong heterogeneity in outcomes. We find large income losses for workers who move to regions where they have family or to rural areas, while, for example, rural to urban movers realize a significant long-term earnings increase. We also find that life events related to fertility, divorce, and new relationships correlate with mobility after job loss and may partly explain the large income losses.

Using Norwegian population panel data with nearly career-long earnings histories, we provide a detailed picture of the causal relationship between schooling and earnings over the life cycle. To address selection bias, we apply three commonly used identification strategies. We find that additional schooling gives higher lifetime earnings and a steeper age-earnings profile, in line with predictions from human capital theory. Our preferred estimates imply an internal rate of return of around 11%, suggesting that it was highly profitable to acquire additional schooling. Our analysis reveals that Mincer regressions dramatically understate the returns to schooling because key assumptions are violated.

In standard promotion tournaments, contestants are ranked based on their output or productivity. We argue that workers' career progression may also depend on their relative rankings in dimensions a priori unrelated to their job performance, such as visibility or in-person presence. Such implicit tournaments may rationalize a variety of seemingly counterproductive practices in the workplace, including long working hours, low uptake of statutory leave, and presenteeism. We illustrate the significance of implicit tournaments using the case of paternity leave among new fathers, where we exogenously vary a focal worker's ranking within a contest, not via his own leave status but that of his competitors, exploiting a policy reform. We show that the focal worker is put on a better earnings trajectory than otherwise when a larger share of his competitors take leave because of the reform. The focal worker's own absolute leave, however, has no direct effect on his earnings path as long as his own and his competitors' leave statuses are symmetric. With effective coordination, it should thus be possible for all fathers to utilize paternity leave without incurring unwarranted career costs. This has implications for statutory leave policies, flexible work arrangements, and gender equality.

This paper demonstrates that a large economic shock such as an oil boom increases intergenerational earnings mobility among directly affected men, mostly through increased bottom-up mobility, but not for women. Preexisting local differences in mobility or shifts in the earnings distributions do not drive these findings. Instead, changes in relative earnings paid to workers with different skills offer the best explanation. Moreover, we document that intergenerational mobility is significantly higher for the indirectly affected third generation and that the oil boom broke the earnings link between first- and third-generation men.

This paper studies the long-term and life cycle consequences of increasing access to mother and child health care centers in the first year of life. Access to these centers increased completed years of schooling by 0.15 years and earnings by 2%. These effects were stronger for children from a low socioeconomic background and contribute to a 10% reduction in the intergenerational persistence in educational attainment. Better nutrition within the first year of life is a likely mechanism. In particular, we find positive effects on adult height, fewer health risks at age 40, and decreased infant mortality from diarrhea.

High school students from non-elite backgrounds are less likely to have peers with elite-educated parents than their elite counterparts. This difference in social capital is a key driver of the high intergenerational persistence in elite education. We identify a positive elite peer effect on enrollment in elite programs and labor market earnings, then disentangle underlying mechanisms. Exploiting a lottery in assessment, a causal mediation analysis shows the overall positive peer effect reflects a positive effect on application behavior (conditional on GPA). When considering income mobility, we find that further mixing between high school elite and non-elite students could improve mobility.