Analyses of Intergenerational Mobility

Abstract

This article reviews the sociological and economic literature on intergenerational mobility. Findings on social class, occupational status, earnings, and income mobility are discussed and discrepancies among them are evaluated. The review also examines nonlinearities in the intergenerational association, variation in mobility across advanced industrial countries, and recent mobility trends in the United States. The literature suggests an association between inequality and economic mobility at the country level, with the United States featuring higher inequality and lower mobility than other advanced industrial countries. However, mobility has not declined in the United States over the recent decades in which inequality has expanded. The inequality-mobility relationship fails to emerge when occupational measures of mobility are used, likely because these measures do not fully capture some mechanisms of economic reproduction.

Inequality and Mobility: Gatsby in the Americas

“…In particular, Chetty et al, [2] and Hilger [3] use two different measures of social mobility and both find no trend in US intergenerational mobility from 1980 to 2010 despite a sharp increase in inequality. As Torche [4] argues in her recent comprehensive survey of social mobility in Latin America, these findings create a "conundrum and a challenge" for the Gatsby Curve hypothesis. Even before Harvard's Equality of Opportunity Project findings, Jantti and Jenkins [5] questioned the cross country evidence for the GGC as well.…”

OCCUPATIONAL AND INCOME INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY IN BRAZIL BETWEEN THE 1990s AND 2000s

“…Divergences in the patterns and trends of occupational and income mobilities are not particular to Brazil: studies in various other countries also point to this kind of inconsistency (Torche, 2015). For some time scholars of social mobility have been suggesting that these kinds of divergence should be resolved through the use of models and analyses combining occupational and income mobility (Morgan, Grusky & Fields, 2006) and indeed studies are now being developed along these lines (Breen, Mood & Jonsson, 2016).…”

“…In this article I employ this approach to study income mobility. It is important to remember that most studies analyze mobility in terms of wage earnings, but there are also important studies that use family income or income from all sources (Torche, 2015), which would be a more complete measure since it takes into account other incomes coming, for example, from spouses and mothers.…”

“…The data used in most empirical studies, however, are on transitory income at the moment of the person's life when it is measured (month or year). This limitation entails the need to adopt for a series of precautions when undertaking empirical analyses (Torche, 2015). For example, the moment of the life cycle when the income of the parents and children was measured should be taken into account.…”

Measurement in education

“…In the debate about intergenerational mobility and inequality, in the media as well as in the scientific literature (Torche, 2015), authors commonly refer to observed correlations between schooling outcomes and parental characteristics to support their claims or theories. With only one outcome measure at hand this is often the best that can be done.…”