The goal of school tracking (assigning students to different types of school by ability) is to increase educational efficiency by creating more homogeneous groups of students that are easier to teach. However, there are concerns that, if begun too early in the schooling process, tracking may...

A strong association between incomes across generations - with children from poor families likely to be poor as adults - is frequently considered an indicator of insufficient equality of opportunity. Studies of such "intergenerational persistence," or lack of intergenerational mobility, are...

This report surveys the research in OECD countries on intergenerational mobility – i.e. the extent to which key characteristics and life experiences of individuals differ from those of their parents. A number of findings emerge: Intergenerational earnings mobility varies significantly across...

In this paper, we employ register data for eight cohorts of second-generation immigrant pupils to identify the impact of each parent’s years since migration on their children’s school achievements. We exploit variation in years since migration and within-family variation. We find evidence of...

This paper assesses recent patterns in intergenerational social mobility across OECD countries and examines the role that public policies can play in affecting such mobility. It shows that the relationship between parental or socio-economic background and offspring’s educational and wage...

This paper extends the previous literature on the intergenerational transmission of human capital by exploiting variation in compulsory schooling reforms across nine European countries over the period 1920–1956. My empirical strategy follows an instrumental variable (IV) approach,...