Intergenerational mobility of socio-economic status in comparative perspective

This paper reviews three strands of literature on socio-economic intergenerational mobility. The first is a mostly recent and rapidly growing economics literature that measures mobility in labour earnings and income. This approach is compared with two classical sociological approaches that measure the mobility in class and status. The United States seems to rank quite high in terms of class and status mobility, but low in terms of earnings and income mobility. This seemingly contradictory result can be accounted for by lower earnings mobility within occupations in the United States.