Rags to rags, riches to riches: essays on occupational mobility in England, 1851-1911

Zhu, Ziming (2025) Rags to rags, riches to riches: essays on occupational mobility in England, 1851-1911. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis uses census-linked datasets, created from digitised full-count decennial censuses of England and Wales between 1851 and 1911, to estimate occupational mobility in Victorian and Edwardian England. The thesis is divided into three papers. Existing research in social mobility predominantly focus on the intergenerational aspect while largely ignoring another important channel for mobility — mobility over the life course. Using a linked sample of over 400,000 men, the first paper estimates the levels of life-course (intragenerational) mobility in England between 1851–1881 and 1881–1911. By regressing current occupational ranks on initial occupational ranks, this paper finds an intragenerational rank-rank correlation of between 0.61 to 0.68 over a 10-year period, and between 0.50 to 0.57 over a 30-year period. Low occupational mobility was mostly driven by the primary and secondary sectors, but new occupations in services and professions also appear to be relatively secure. Life-course mobility was limited for the Victorians and experienced by only a small minority working in tertiary sectors. England during this period appears to be far from an open society. The second paper uses a different and likewise newly constructed linked sample of between 67,000 and 160,000 father-son pairs in 1851–1911 to provide revised estimates of intergenerational occupational mobility in England. After correcting for classical measurement error using instrumental variables, I find that conventional estimates of intergenerational elasticities could severely underestimate the extent of father-son association in socioeconomic status. Instrumenting one measure of the father’s outcome with a second measure of the father’s outcome raises the intergenerational elasticities of occupational status from 0.4 to 0.6-0.7. Victorian England was therefore a society of limited social mobility. The implications of my results for long-run evolution and international comparisons of social mobility in England are discussed. The third paper explores spatial variations in intergenerational mobility in England at the end of the nineteenth century, using a census-linked dataset of between 160,000 to 600,000 father-son pairs observed between 1881 and 1911. The results show that there is already a north-south divide in terms of intergenerational mobility in late-Victorian England, using rank-based measures of relative mobility and absolute mobility. In addition, mobility patterns exhibit clear differences depending on migration history and origins. Migrants from the North are much more mobile than those that remained in the North and experience significant gains in occupational ranks from migration, while the same pattern is not observed for Southern migrants and non-migrants. The advantages of north-south migration hold even after accounting for selective migration using household fixed effects. Finally, there is also evidence that there was a ‘Great Gatsby curve’ in late-Victorian England, as places of higher occupational inequality were also places of lower social mobility.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2025 Ziming Zhu
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
Sets:	Departments > Economic History
Supervisor:	Cummins, Neil and Minns, Chris
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4812

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