Intergenerational Social Mobility in European OECD Countries

This paper breaks new ground by providing comparable estimates of intergenerational wage and educationpersistence across 14 European OECD countries based on a new micro data from Eurostat. A furthernovelty is that it examines the potential role of public policies and labour and product market institutions inexplaining observed differences in intergenerational wage mobility across countries. The empiricalestimates show that intergenerational wage persistence is relatively high in southern European countries, aswell as in the United Kingdom. Likewise, intergenerational persistence in education is relatively high bothin southern European countries and in Luxembourg and Ireland. By contrast, both persistence in wages andeducation tends to be lower in Nordic countries. In addition, empirical results show that education is oneimportant driver of intergenerational wage persistence across European countries. There is a positive crosscountrycorrelation between intergenerational wage mobility and redistributive policies, as well as apositive correlation between wage-setting institutions that compress the wage distribution and mobility.