مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The economic literature about intergenerational social mobility has focused mainly on the interrelationships between the economic status of parents and children. One of its main findings is that the degree of social mobility depends on various factors that are related to the economic success of individuals such as, for example, their decisions about the acquisition of human capital. Furthermore, the role of education has been enhanced in most developed countries during the last years because of the process of industrialization and the continual technological changes, which have lead to the need of a highly skilled workforce. These facts may encourage the appearance of a potentially more meritocratic society with more equality of opportunities and where the accumulation of knowledge is an instrument to achieve a more efficient allocation of talent. As a consequence, people from families with different socioeconomic levels could have similar chances of success in terms of expected income and upward career (Behrman & Taubman, 1990). Other factors related to the intergenerational social mobility are innate abilities arising from the association between the genetic endowments of parents and children, environmental factors such as the type of institutions, or the knowledge acquired by the individuals through their lifelong learning or their labour experience. On the other hand, the comparative advantages associated with heritable aspects, the transmission of occupation-specific skills or the type of educational investment can induce children to work in the same fathers’ occupations, slowing down the intergenerational changes.

Social mobility has been analysed theoretically by the sociological and economic literature in the tradition of the Family Economy (Becker & Tomes, 1986). In this setting, the parents’ utility depends on the children’s utility, and this intergenerational link involves that parents choose how to distribute their income between consuming or investing in education for their offspring,which will have long run consequences on children’s future income. Therefore, public policies play a relevant role for promoting social mobility through the improvement of the access to the human capital and raising the capacity to finance the education costs (Dutta, Sefton, & Weale, 1999).

Studies about intergenerational mobility can help to identify and to remove the obstacles to mobility, the rationality for breaking down such barriers is to get a better allocation of human skills and talents that increases the productivity and favours the competitiveness and the economic growth. Traditionally, economic literature have adopted diverse definitions of social mobility. On one hand, it is defined as movements up or down within the income distribution of children in comparison with their parents. The empirical research following this methodology obtains an intergenerational elasticity coefficient, which measures the correlation between parental income and offspring’s income (see for example, Atkinson, 1981 or Zimmerman, 1992), and estimates transition probability matrixes to measure income mobility through different segments of the earnings distribution (Checchi, 1997). On the other hand, social mobility is analysed comparing the type of occupation reached by the children with respect to that of their parents. This last procedure has some advantages over the income analysis. Firstly, occupational mobility is more stable and causes persistent changes in earnings that are not necessarily related to the short-run variations in wages. For instance, Keane and Wolpin (1997) formulate a model to explain how the individual expected value of the lifetime earnings is maximised through the choice of an optimal sequence of occupations. Secondly, occupational category is a proxy of the socio-economic status since it compiles variables such as wages, educational attainment and talent. Moreover, occupational data across generations are probably more reliably reported by individuals than income data. For all these reasons, the analysis of occupational mobility adds economic interest compared to the study of earnings mobility. From an empirical point of view, some interesting works about this topic are, for example, Ermisch and Francesconi (2002); Hellerstein and Morrill (2011), and Long and Ferrie (2013). Ermisch and Francesconi (2002) using data from the British labour market analyse the occupational mobility between parents and children through the movements along the index of occupational prestige proposed by Goldthorpe and Hope (1974). These authors find that the intergenerational elasticity decreases as the parental social status increases. Hellerstein and Morrill (2011) examine changing intergenerational transmission from father to daughter in the US, by focusing on the occupational status. They obtain that the probability that daughters and fathers had the same occupation was increasing along the 20th century. Finally, Long and Ferrie (2013) identify the historic differences in intergenerational occupational mobility between Britain and the US from the beginning of the 1850s, finding that the US had more intergenerational occupational mobility in the three decades after 1850 than either Britain or the actual US.