Like father like son? Intergenerational immobility in England, 1851-1911

This paper uses a linked sample of between 67,000 and 160,000 father-son pairs in 1851-1911 to provide revised estimates of intergenerational occupational mobility in England. After correcting for classical measurement errors using instrumental variables, I find that conventional estimates of intergenerational elasticities could severely underestimate the extent of father-son association in socioeconomic status. Instrumenting one measure of the father’s outcome with a second measure of the father’s outcome raises the intergenerational elasticities (β) of occupational status from 0.4 to 0.6-0.7. Victorian England was therefore a society of limited social mobility. The implications of my results for long-run evolution and international comparisons of social mobility in England are discussed.