The study, led by researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) and the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW Mannheim), also found the benefits are felt not only by individuals but also in the economy and society at large.
The circumstances into which we are born can place fundamental constraints on our future economic opportunities, leading to a mismatch between talent, education and occupation, the report asserts.
A major determinant of this inequality of opportunity is the absence of intergenerational educational mobility.
The report states that if socioeconomic circumstances outside of an individual’s control constrain their educational opportunities, they may not be able to acquire a level of education commensurate with their abilities.
“In turn, intergenerational immobility (that is, persistence) of education contributes to the reproduction of economic inequalities if the unachievable educational pathways are positively related to future earnings trajectories,” it reads.
The research findings suggest that greater intergenerational educational mobility goes hand in hand with significantly higher innovation output across Europe.
“Our results highlight that investment in improving educational opportunities delivers not only social but also economic returns,” Patrick Lehnert, UZH professor of personnel economics, says.
“It is precisely those regions with low mobility that hold large, currently untapped innovation potential.”
Better deployment of talent
The researchers explain this relationship as a matter of tapping into existing skills and talent more effectively.
When individual ability rather than social background determines educational and career paths, a society’s innovation output rises.
“When a cohort reaches working age, higher educational mobility leads to an increase in patent applications of roughly 11 percent on average,” Sarah McNamara, a co-author of the report from ZEW Mannheim, says.
The findings challenge the widespread assumption that there is a trade-off between equal opportunity and economic performance.
Instead, they show that fairer educational opportunities can significantly contribute to economic success.
Regional differences in educational mobility
The study also documents substantial differences within Europe.
Regions with low educational mobility tend to also show high educational inequality – a pattern known in income research as the ‘Great Gatsby Curve’.
Experts say there's a need in Australia for better data on educational attainment and social mobility. “If policymakers don’t know what works ... they will spend money on the wrong things,” they say.
The researchers have now visualised this relationship for the first time in the form of a ‘Great Gatsby Map’ for Europe.
Educational mobility is particularly low in some parts of southern and eastern Europe.
Northern and central Europe, by contrast, tend to show less inequality both within and between generations.
At the same time, pronounced regional differences also exist within individual countries such as Germany and France.
Education policy as innovation policy
The analyses reveal the link between educational mobility and innovation is not equally strong everywhere.
Regions with low mobility have the most to gain from improvements in educational opportunity.
There, improving access to educational opportunities can trigger an above-average surge in innovation.
“According to our results, what counts is not the average level of education alone, but above all how fairly educational opportunities are distributed,” Guido Neidhöfer, from ZEW Mannheim concludes.
“When people have access to high-quality education regardless of their background, talent is put to better use and contributes more to social and technological progress.”
The researchers see this as an important finding for education and economic policy: measures that promote equal opportunity can also strengthen a region’s capacity for innovation over the long run.
New dataset for European regions
The study draws on the newly developed EUROPE-IGM-ATLAS dataset, which researchers from UZH and ZEW Mannheim helped to build.
For the first time, it provides annual indicators of intergenerational educational mobility for European regions over the period from 1985 to 2025.
The team combined harmonised microdata from the European Social Survey with age-specific profiles of labour-market and innovation participation, and then linked these to regional patent data from the European Patent Office.
“This result is highly relevant for policy stakeholders as it emphasises the importance of better exploiting the existing talent pool to generate economic growth, underscoring the argument that improving equality of opportunity contributes to a better allocation of talent and abilities, and eventually improves the efficiency of economic systems,” the report concludes.
How does Australia compare?
In Australia, there’s been very little recent research looking at intergenerational educational mobility, however intergenerational mobility per say is relatively high compared to other advanced economies, with about 67 per cent of the Generation X cohort earning more than their parents did at a similar age.
Studies reveal that a 10-percentile rise in a parent’s income rank results in a minimal 1.8 to 3.5 percentile shift for the child.
A Productivity Commission report in 2024 found that while Australia performs exceptionally well on income mobility (placing near the top alongside Scandinavian nations), it remains highly “sticky” at the extremes.
Children born into the lowest income decile have a 15 per cent chance of staying there, while only 6 per cent climb to the highest decile.
In an article for The Conversation, Professor Robert Breunig and PhD candidate Matthew Taylor said the commission’s report highlighted the need for better data on educational attainment and social mobility.
“This will enable better analysis of the links between the two – and ultimately more effective education policy,” they wrote.
“If policymakers don’t know what works, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, they will spend money on the wrong things.”
Building a more effective education system to support, maintain and improve social mobility, they said, requires the right tools.
“Without better integrated data and a more reliable education evidence base, taxpayers are far less likely to see a return on the billions being spent.”
There’s no sign yet that the current Federal Government is interested in gathering that data.
Research based on the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth, from 2014, found that while absolute educational outcomes have improved (more students finishing Year 12), relative intergenerational mobility has remained stagnant since the 1970s.
High-SES children were just as likely to attain top tertiary entrance ranks then as they were decades previously.
NSW Government research from 2016 also indicated that socioeconomic status had a stronger impact on educational attainment for females than for males, and education accounted for a larger share of intergenerational income immobility for Australian women.
It’s hardest for those with the least
Australians living in poverty face some of the highest barriers to economic mobility, Commissioner Catherine de Fontenay said when the Fairly equal? Economic mobility in Australia report came out in 2024.
“Most Australians have had a good opportunity to climb the income ladder, but it’s a much harder climb for Australians living in poverty,” de Fontenay said.
Although interrupted by the pandemic, the poverty rate in Australia has slowly increased over recent years. About one in seven Australians experienced poverty in 2022 – the highest level since 2001.
How long poverty lasts matters as much as how many people it affects – about 10 per cent of Australians experienced poverty in at least three of the five years between 2018 and 2022.
The report collected a trove of data on poverty risk factors, showing renters, people from migrant backgrounds who do not speak English at home and single parents are among the groups most at risk.
Moreover, people who lived in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, including those in remote locations, were more likely to remain in poverty over time.
“Australia really has been the ‘land of the fair go’ for many, but we can’t ignore what’s happening for people in poverty,” PC chair Danielle Wood said after the Fairly equal? report was released.
“Policymakers should make sure support is targeted to where people need it most.”
