Moving towards estimating lifetime intergenerational economic mobility in the UK

Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility that use point in time measures of income and earnings suffer from lifecycle and attenuation bias. They also suffer from sample selection issues and further bias driven by spells out of work.We consider these issues together for UK data, the National Child Development Study and British Cohort Study, for the first time. When all three biases are considered, our best estimate of lifetime intergenerational economic persistence in the UK is 0.43 for children born in 1970. Whilst we argue that this is the best available estimate to date, we discuss why there is good reason to believe that this is still a lower bound, owing to residual attenuation bias.