Family background can influence offspring earnings in two ways: conditioning their educational attainments (indirect effect) and circumscribing their opportunities in the labour market, independently from their educational attainment (direct effect). In this paper, following a multi-steps...

We compare earnings inequality and mobility across the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. during the late 1990s. A flexible model of earnings dynamics that isolates positional mobility within a stable earnings distribution is estimated. Earnings trajectories are then simulated, and...