Abstract
Abstract This study uses the natural experiment of German reunification and a difference-in-differences approach to test whether the political and economic transition in East Germany in 1990 affected intergenerational occupational and educational mobility. Results obtained using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study show that German reunification did neither strongly affect occupational nor educational mobility. These findings are robust to operationalizing social origin in various ways. Admittedly, reunification may have had small or long-term effects on occupational and educational mobility that cannot be uncovered with the data and research design employed in this study. However, the findings rule out that there were large, short- or medium-term effects of German reunification on intergenerational mobility. These findings are at odds with theories that argue that institutional change has strong, immediate causal effects on intergenerational mobility.
Highlights
Children are influenced in their educational and occupational outcomes by their parents’ resources (Blau and Duncan, 1967; Sewell, Haller and Portes, 1969; Jencks et al, 1972)
This study uses the natural experiment of German reunification and a difference-in-differences approach to test whether the political and economic transition in East Germany in 1990 affected intergenerational occupational and educational mobility
A major difference between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was the lower amount of children who received an Abitur degree in the GDR due to a strict limitation of the admittance of pupils to the track leading to the Abitur degree
Summary
Children are influenced in their educational and occupational outcomes by their parents’ resources (Blau and Duncan, 1967; Sewell, Haller and Portes, 1969; Jencks et al, 1972). Previous research analyzed changes in the associations between family socioeconomic background and occupational outcomes during the transition from a state-centered socialist to a market economy in Hungary (Bukodi and Goldthorpe, 2010; Lippenyi and Gerber, 2016), Russia (Gerber and Hout, 2004), and 13 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (Jackson and Evans, 2017). These four studies identified the effects of regime change on occupational mobility by comparing occupational mobility between a cohort preceding and a cohort following the transformation. The second cohort, was affected by the changes in educational institutions, including the changes in the age at tracking, and intergenerational mobility of these men and women can have been affected by both changes in labour market institutions and changes in the education system
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