Intergenerational Mobility Trends and the Changing Role of Female Labor

Trends in Occupational Mobility in Indianapolis

This chapter provides an overview of recent large-scale studies on historical trends in social mobility. The major findings are that intergenerational mobility increased and marital mobility showed a shift from ascription to achievement in the nineteenth century when industrialization and socioeconomic modernization took place. Most studies show trends in mobility, but only few analyze the association of mobility with indicators of modernization. Those that do so indicate that marital mobility was more clearly related to modernization than intergenerational mobility was. Studies are appearing that focus on women’s mobility and on non-Western countries, but these are still too few to draw general conclusions. Future research could benefit from better and more comparable measures of modernization. Alternative hypotheses on the causes of trends in intergenerational and marital mobility, related to societal inequality, political regimes, educational systems, culture, and religion, are also still awaiting testing.

How does intergenerational educational mobility change under educational expansion? This paper examines this question in Mexico, which enacted two important school expansion plans between 1959 and 1992. Using the 2011 Mexican Social Mobility Survey, I analyze how intergenerational mobility changes under different phases of expansion reform, and how do these trends vary according to the particular stage of the schooling process. Main findings indicate that mobility patterns are not stalled across cohorts, as reproduction theories predict. However, they do not reflect equalization at all levels of education either, as modernization hypotheses anticipate. Expansion reforms, especially the “11-year plan,” are associated with positive trends in mobility in primary and lower-secondary schooling, but also with a decrease in intergenerational mobility at higher levels of education. Thus, these findings are consistent with the maximally maintained inequality hypothesis.

This paper discusses long term trends in patterns of intergenerational social mobility in Britain. We argue that there is convincing empirical evidence of a small but steady linear trend towards increasing social mobility throughout the period 1800-2004. Our conclusions are based upon the construction and analysis of an extended micro-social dataset, which combines records from an historical genealogical study, with responses from 31 sample surveys conducted over the period 1963-2004. There has been much previous study of trends in social mobility, and little consensus on their nature. We argue that this dissension partly results from the very slow pace of change in mobility rates, which makes the time-frame of any comparison crucial, and raises important methodological questions about how long-term change in mobility is best measured. We highlight three methodological difficulties which arise when trying to draw conclusions over mobility trends - concerning the extent of controls for life course effects; the quality of data resources; and the measurement of stratification positions. After constructing a longitudinal dataset which attempts to confront these difficulties, our analyses provide robust evidence which challenges hitherto more popular, politicised claims of declining or unchanging mobility. By contrast, our findings suggest that Britain has moved, and continues to move, steadily towards increasing equality in the relationship between occupational attainment and parental background.

Previous studies of recent U.S. trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results, partly because of large sampling errors. By making more efficient use of the available information in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we generate more reliable estimates of the recent time series variation in intergenerational mobility. Our results, which pertain to the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975, do not reveal major changes in intergenerational mobility.

Previous studies of recent U.S. trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results, partly because of large sampling errors.By making more efficient use of the available information in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we generate more reliable estimates of the recent time-series variation in intergenerational mobility.Our results, which pertain to the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975, do not reveal major changes in intergenerational mobility.

Intergenerational social mobility has been of interest to economists and sociologists in recent years. However, with the development of methodologies and applications, it has been found that studying income mobility and class mobility separately often led to some conflicting findings. The class mobility and income mobility of China, a major developing country, has attracted the widespread interest of economists and sociologists from around the world. In this article, we attempt to answer the following questions: Should these divergent findings of intergenerational income and class mobility be regarded as a result of the differing data problems faced by researchers seeking to investigate income and class mobility or as a result of their differing analytical approaches? Is there a significant difference between intergenerational class mobility and income mobility in China? Our own comparative analysis involves measuring the magnitudes and temporal trends of intergenerational class mobility and income mobility. By using China Health and Nutrition Survey data, this paper explicitly tests the differences in the intergenerational associations of the income table and the class table from the “local”, “global”, and “comprehensive” perspectives, and provides smooth estimates of trends of both social class mobility and income mobility. This empirical study demonstrates that there is strong evidence showing that China’s class mobility and income mobility are not consistent in both fluidity levels and trend changes using the same data and same analytical approaches. Furthermore, there is a stronger association between fathers’ class and children’s class than between fathers’ income and children’s income, and the temporal trend of class mobility is more volatile than that of income mobility. This leads us to suggest that, in China, class may in general be a better indicator of socioeconomic status than one-shot measures of current income.

Educational expansion and trends in intergenerational social mobility among Korean men

This article presents the historical trends in intergenerational income mobility in Brazil between the 1990s and 2000s, based on an analysis of two age cohorts. The findings indicate a significant increase in social mobility. A second objective is to compare economic and sociological approaches to intergenerational mobility, utilizing trends in income mobility and occupational status mobility for this purpose. While the former rose substantially, the latter increased much more modestly. Finally, the article analyses the relation between intergenerational mobility in education and the other two types of mobility. Breaking down income and occupational mobilities into those factors that directly link parents to children (pure inheritance) and other factors mediated by education (mediated inheritance) reveals significantly different results for income and occupation.

Based on complete population data, with the exact same definitions of family class background and economic outcomes for a large number of birth cohorts, we examine post-war trends in intergenera-tional economic mobility in Norway. Standard summary statistics indicate stable or mildly declining rank–rank mobility for sons and sharply declining mobility for daughters. The most conspicuous trend in the mobility patterns is that men and women born into the lowest parts of the parental earnings distribution have fallen behind in terms of own earnings rank, as well as a number of other quality-of-life indicators. A considerable part of this development can be explained by changes in the class distribution of educational attainment and in its rising influence on earnings rank. We argue that although the educational revolution has diminished the role of inherited ability, it has enlarged the influence of the family as provider of a social learning environment.

We compare intergenerational class mobility trends in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, exploring the effects of education over birth cohorts. After presenting descriptive measures of absolute mobility, we use log-linear models to study relative mobility and the mediating role of education. Then, we examine trends in intergenerational class mobility linked to educational levels over cohorts. Finally, counterfactual simulations show the net effects of education on mobility. Results show that intergenerational class mobility across cohorts occurred only for men in Argentina and Chile. Inequality trends in educational opportunities were only present for women. Class returns to education occurred among men in Chile and Uruguay, and women in Argentina. Social fluidity under the mediating effects of education did not show a clear pattern. The claim that educational expansion created more opportunities for intergenerational mobility does not find support in our data.

In the face of continued socioeconomic inheritance, the belief that the simple expansion of educational opportunities will create meritocratic societies has been met with skepticism. It is well documented that within expanding educational systems, class-advantaged families attempt to secure further advantages for their offspring. Conversely, for many, the modernist belief that educational expansion is a means to achieving a fairer society remains compelling. Studying trends in intergenerational occupational mobility in 40 countries from four continents, I examine whether educational expansion enhances occupational mobility, and whether such trends are counteracted by heightened persistence between social origin and destination within education groups. The results indicate that educational expansion over time, and the policies supporting it, are linked to improved intergenerational occupational mobility. Furthermore, this increased mobility through expanded educational opportunities is not negated by a strengthening of within-education elite persistence in occupational status, suggesting that occupational mobility patterns can genuinely change through educational expansion. The modernist ideology around educational expansion as a driver of social mobility may warrant renewed attention.

We make use of newly available data that include roughly 5 million linked household and population records from 1850 to 2015 to document long-term trends in intergenerational social mobility in the United States. Intergenerational mobility declined substantially over the past 150 y, but more slowly than previously thought. Intergenerational occupational rank-rank correlations increased from less than 0.17 to as high as 0.32, but most of this change occurred to Americans born before 1900. After controlling for the relatively high mobility of persons from farm origins, we find that intergenerational social mobility has been remarkably stable. In contrast with relative stability in rank-based measures of mobility, absolute mobility for the nonfarm population-the fraction of offspring whose occupational ranks are higher than those of their parents-increased for birth cohorts born prior to 1900 and has fallen for those born after 1940.

In this paper, we study long-term trends in social mobility in the People's Republic of China since its inception in 1949, with two operationalizations: 1) intergenerational occupational mobility and 2) intergenerational educational mobility. We draw on an accumulation of administrative and survey data and provide comparable estimates of these measures for birth cohorts born after 1945. To help interpret the results, we compare trends in China to those in the United States for the same birth cohorts. We find an increase in intergenerational occupational mobility in China due to its rapid industrialization in recent decades. Net of industrialization, however, intergenerational occupational mobility has been declining for recent cohorts. Intergenerational educational mobility in China shows a similar declining trend. In addition, mobility patterns have differed greatly by gender, with women in earlier cohorts and from a rural origin particularly disadvantaged. We attribute the general decline in social mobility to market forces that have taken hold since China's economic reform that began in 1978. In contrast, social mobility by both measures has been relatively stable in the United States. However, while social mobility in China has trended downward, it is still higher than that in the United States, except for women's educational mobility.

Based on the findings of the China General Social Survey, this study aims to analyze the trend of the intergenerational mobility in China since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy by evaluating the absolute and relative mobility rates through the mobility table. The intergenerational mobility level in China is relatively high from the perspective of the absolute mobility rates. Besides, the overall trend is upward and social openness is quite high. However, the intergenerational mobility level is relatively low and gradually declining from the perspective of the relative mobility rates that reflect the equality of mobility opportunities. In addition, the social class structure shows a tendency of solidifying. While the absolute mobility rates reflect the efficiency of the intergenerational mobility, the relative mobility rates reflect its fairness. However, since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy, Chinese society appears to be in a state of inadequate equality but with high efficiency. In this study, we generally regarded education as a critical factor of the intergenerational mobility. Lately, China has implemented a series of education policies, including the resumption of university entrance examination policy, compulsory education policy, and college enrollment expansion policy. The Chinese government endeavors to enhance national education attainment and sustain absolute mobility at a higher level. Nevertheless, the differences in education attainment of offspring from different social classes have increased gradually, making education inequality a significant factor of lower relative mobility. Thus, the government should increase the intergenerational mobility level by creating a healthy and stable economic development environment and improving education inequality.​