revised version published in: Economic Journal, 2006, 116 (513), 659-679
This paper investigates the links between the socio-economic position of parents and the
socio-economic position of their offspring and, through the marriage market, the socioeconomic
position of their offspring’s parents-in-law. Using the Goldthorpe-Hope score of
occupational prestige as a measure of status and samples drawn from the British Household
Panel Survey 1991-1999, we find that the intergenerational elasticity is around 0.2 for men
and between 0.17 and 0.23 for women. On average, the intragenerational correlation is
lower, and of the order of 0.15 to 0.18, suggesting that the returns to human capital, which is
transmitted across generations by altruistic parents, contribute more to social status than
assortative mating in the marriage market. Substantially higher estimates are reported when
measurement error is accounted for. We also find strong nonlinearities, whereby both inter-
and intra-generational elasticities tend to increase with parental status. We offer four possible
explanations for this finding, three of which – one based on mean-displacement shifts in the
occupational prestige distribution, another based on life-cycle effects and the third based on
differential measurement errors – do not find strong support in our data. The fourth
explanation is based on the notion of intergenerational transmission of social capital and
intellectual capital. The evidence supports the idea that richer parents are likely to have a
larger and more valuable stock of both social capital and intellectual capital to pass on to
their children.
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