Lifetime Economic Mobility:Understanding mobility within and across generations

Intergenerational socio-economic mobility has re-emerged as one of the key issues in academic, media and political discourse over the last decade, following from academic research, including contributions from the applicants, that showed how mobility had declined in the UK. Despite this rise in prominence, research into intergenerational mobility is still, in many ways, in its infancy. This proposal aims to add three major new outputs to this evidence base, bringing in a new methodology emerging from a related field.

The first part of the proposal directly asks the question of 'How mobile is our society?' addressing concerns about the accurate measurement of intergenerational mobility in the face of data limitations. When measuring mobility across generations we would ideally capture life-time mobility, observing the older generation across their offspring's entire childhood and the younger generation across their entire adult lives. These demanding requirements mean that ideal data are not fully available in the UK and estimates of mobility are based on measures at points in time. Such point in time estimates will differ from a life-time picture in three important ways. Previous literature has identified two of these issues: measurement error and life-cycle bias. These issues have been given limited attention to date in the UK. An additional measurement problem, which has yet to be considered at all in the literature, stems from the fact that earnings is only measured when people are working. Therefore we only measure the mobility of the employed. If we are attempting to measure a person's life time earnings, periods of worklessness will be important and are likely to shift our understanding of patterns of mobility, as worklessness is more common among those from deprived backgrounds. This new work will therefore give, for the first time in the UK, a robust estimate of how mobile our society actually is. Given what we already know about the likely biases in the data, we expect to find that the UK is far less mobile than previously acknowledged.

The second research area addresses the limited advancements that have been made to date in understanding how other domains of intergenerational transmissions, such as education, class and worklessness, relate to intergenerational income mobility. We will introduce a new methodological approach, from the related field of earnings mobility, which adds a significant improvement in the assessment of how patterns of mobility are related across different dimensions of a person's origin. This technique also enables us to consider where in the distribution of family income in childhood that mobility across these domains actually occurs. This offers a step-advancement on what the current literature can offer in this area and brings together a number of separate domains into one framework.

Finally, we will bring together the two closely related literatures of mobility within and across generations for the first time to explore what appears to be contrasting findings. The intragenerational mobility literature has found evidence of increased earnings mobility as people age for a recent cohort of people. In contrast, the intergenerational mobility literature has documented how these people experienced less mobility in terms of their family background. We will use our methodological advancements from the second research project to consider both types of mobility in a consolidated framework, describing how these apparently contrasting findings can work together. This will be new and informative work for understanding how family background relates not only to later life outcomes but also to inequality and mobility later in life.

Given the current high political interest in this subject area, we believe that this research will not just be a substantive advance on the academic literature but will have a substantial wider impact in the media and in policy development.

Intergenerational mobility has re-emerged as a key dimension of social policy research following new findings concerning intergenerational economic mobility over the last decade. This research has led to intergenerational mobility becoming the key goal of the UK government's social policy strategy. This project will achieve a step advance in our understanding of intergenerational economic mobility in the UK and will be of substantial benefit to policy makers in government as it seeks to improve equality of opportunity in Britain. We therefore would expect the work to be of significant interest to the newly established Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. We would also anticipate communicating our findings to officials at the DWP, Treasury and Cabinet Office and with contacts in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister who has a strong interest in this area. The findings would also be of considerable interest to non-government organizations such as the Sutton Trust, the Social Mobility Foundation and the Intergenerational Foundation.

We will stage a major conference toward the end of the project to address a broad audience. This will be in London and we will seek to invite other major researchers on family structure, poverty and children's life chances from the UK and abroad. This will provide a key opportunity both for influencing policy makers and getting the research out into the public domain. Attendance will be drawn from the Commission, Cabinet Office, government departments and a range on non-government organisations with interests in mobility and the impact of poverty on life chances. This will include the Sutton Trust, Child Poverty Action Group and Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Social Policy at Bath and the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at Bristol (where Gregg and Macmillan are associates) have outstanding reputations for high quality research, dissemination and for fostering wider impact. Recognition of the impact of research work at Bath on policy and practice is evidenced by its recent award of the prestigious Queen's Anniversary Award for Higher and Further Education. The award to Bath cited our ''Influential research into child poverty and support for vulnerable people'. This specifically includes our research on children and poverty. The University has recently received funding from RCUK under their Public Engagement with Research Catalysts call. We are in the process of establishing a new Public Engagement Unit, and one of the elements of our programme of work is specifically focused on 'public engagement with policy makers'. In addition the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences has appointed a 'research ambassador' with the remit to promote suck links. This project will work closely with and benefit from these initiatives.

This project will exploit Gregg's extensive links to, and experience of working with, policy makers and practitioners to ensure impact (see also the pathways to impact and CVs attached). In addition, we will aim to exploit links made by Macmillan's placement as a Policy Analyst in the Cabinet Office Implementation Unit over the summer. Both have proven experience in engaging with different audiences, producing articles for the ESRCs 'Britain in....' series and 'Society Now' magazine. We will aim to contribute further articles to these publications and produce articles for CMPOs 'Research in Public Policy' bulletin which is sent to a wide-range of practitioners. A project website will be developed and maintained by our administrative appointment that will contain updates on findings, blog posts and podcasts on matters of wide interest.