Using Understanding Society to study intergenerational wealth mobility in the UK

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

December 15, 2023

Summary:

Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study enables researchers to track individuals as they grow up and form new households, making it invaluable for studying the intergenerational persistence of outcomes including income, health and wealth. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Understanding Society relative to other datasets, and document patterns of attrition as individuals transition from childhood to adulthood. We then use Understanding Society to document the intergenerational persistence of wealth in the UK. We find that the intergenerational persistence of wealth is greater than for earnings, and that only around half of the intergenerational persistence of wealth can be explained by the intergenerational persistence in earnings and education.

Published in

Fiscal Studies

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 44 , p.417 -432

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5890.12352

ISSN

1435671

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

© 2023 The Authors. Fiscal Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. on behalf of Institute for Fiscal Studies

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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