Life Course Risks, Mobility Regimes, and Mobility Consequences: A Comparison of Sweden, Germany, and the United States

Abstract

The analysis of intergenerational mobility has primarily used measures of social position that are functions of an individual’s occupation. Occupation‐based models of social mobility, however, have limitations that arguably have grown in recent decades. Meta‐analysis of available evidence for Sweden, western Germany, and the United States concerning occupational mobility, household income mobility, job displacement, union dissolution, and poverty dynamics shows the limitations of the individual‐level occupation‐based career‐trajectory approach to life course mobility. This article develops an alternative formulation at the household level, which focuses on cross‐national variation in the extent to which societal institutions influence the rate of events with the potential to change a household’s life conditions via the manipulation of incentives for mobility‐generating events, and the extent to which they mitigate the consequences of these events through social insurance. The combination of these institutional processes produces the distinctive characteristics of the mobility regimes of these countries.