This thesis aims to study the intergenerational transmission of earnings and health inequalities in developing and developed countries.

The first chapter studies the intergenerational mobility of earnings in Mexico, using ESRU Survey on Social Mobility in Mexico 2011 (ESRU-EMOVI 2011). I utilise the Two-Sample Two-Stage Least Squares approach to estimate the intergenerational elasticity of earnings and the rank-rank coefficient at the national, urban and regional levels, accounting for the attenuation and life-cycle biases suffered by the estimators. The key results show less mobility than previous studies suggested. On average, $70.9%$ of the relative difference in fathers’ earnings is transmitted to their children. Moreover, a 10 percentile point increase in the father’s earnings rank is associated with a $3.15$ percentile point increase in the son’s earnings rank. At the regional level, strong intergenerational persistence is found in the South, the poorest region of Mexico, whilst the North, the wealthiest region, presents the highest intergenerational earnings mobility.

Using Mexican data from ESRU-EMOVI 2011, the second chapter studies intergenerational earnings mobility, focusing on the role of sex, marital status and marital sorting. I examine the implications of using family earnings rather than individual earnings to assess differences in intergenerational earnings mobility for daughters and sons. I find that the intergenerational persistence of earnings is higher for single daughters and married sons than for their counterparts. Additionally, married daughters present higher intergenerational earnings mobility than married sons for individual and family earnings. The sex differences in economic mobility are considerably more significant for combined earnings than individual earnings, suggesting that marital sorting is more critical for daughters.

The final chapter studies the intergenerational transmission of health in the UK. Using the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), I find that having a mother with comorbidity of physical and mental health problems during the offspring’s early childhood or adolescence significantly increases the chance of offspring having mental health problems in early adulthood and comorbidity of physical and mental health problems during early and mid adulthood. Furthermore, if the mother presents poor mental health during early childhood, it is more likely that the offspring suffers from mental health problems in early adulthood, whilst if these problems arise during the offspring’s adolescence, the likelihood of the offspring having poor mental health persists from early to mid adulthood.