Louis Sirugue

How does parents’ income impact the incomes of their adult children? While there is an intergenerational correlation, other factors, such as geographic mobility, need to be accounted for. Louis Sirugue, a doctoral student at INED, answered our questions on individuals’ socio-economic trajectories in France and abroad. 

(Interview conducted in April 2025)

Parents’ income is strongly correlated with their adult children’s income. A child born in the 1970s to parents in the 5th or wealthiest 20% of the French population has a 38.4% chance of reaching that category in his or her generation, whereas for a child born to parents in the 1st or poorest 20% of the population, the probability of belonging to the wealthiest 20% is 9.7%—one-fourth as high. Still, this correlation does not necessarily mean that parental income has a direct causal effect on the income their children will have. Adult children’s income is co-determined by many other dimensions of individuals’ socio-cultural environment, such as place of residence and parents’ educational attainment. 

An individual’s socio-economic trajectory is never entirely predictable, regardless of their social background. Intergenerational mobility—defined as upward or downward movement on the income scale from where parents’ income is situated—is observed at all income levels, but its intensity varies by parents’ social position. If divide the income distribution into five segments, called quintiles, each of which accounts for 20% of the population, we find that the probability of attaining a different quintile from one parents’ is only 60%-70% for individuals whose parents fall into either the lowest (1st) quintile or the highest (5th), as opposed to 75%-80% for individuals whose parents’ income puts them into one of the three intermediate quintiles.

The three most common trajectories are persistence at the bottom of the scale for children from the most disadvantaged families, persistence at the top of the scale among children from the wealthiest families, and movement between the intermediate levels for all others. However, these intergenerational movements and trends do not occur in isolation. They are usually associated with other transitions, particularly residential moves. In fact, intergenerational and geographic mobility prove closely linked. Up and down the parental income distribution, moving to another place of residence at a moment between a child’s adolescence and adulthood is associated with better economic prospects, so much so that an individual from an underprivileged background who settles in an area whose inhabitants are better off attains income prospects (expressed in %, as above) close to those of an individual from a wealthy family who remained in the area of their birth. However, this type of geographical based mobility seldom occurs. Children from the least privileged households are less geographically mobile than others, and they are especially unlikely to move to an area characterized by higher incomes.

As shown by a considerable number of indicators, France has one of the lowest intergenerational mobility levels of the ten developed countries for which comparable estimates are available. The level in France is similar to those found for the United States and Italy and remains far behind levels in Scandinavian countries and Australia. That said, the French intergenerational mobility structure differs in many ways from the Italian and American ones. For example, the regional gradient seems less salient in France than elsewhere; France is characterized by a scattering of “islands” across the country that are favorable to intergenerational socio-economic mobility. Many are found in Britanny and central-eastern France. Moreover, though social reproduction in wealthy families is slightly higher in France than in the US (38.4% versus 36.5%), upward mobility among France’s poorest people is also slightly higher (9.7% versus 7.5%).