Heterogeneous Effects of Intergenerational Social Mobility: An Improved Method and New Evidence

Abstract

Intergenerational social mobility has immense implications for individuals' well-being, attitudes, and behaviors. However, previous methods for estimating mobility effects may be inefficient for identifying within- and between-group heterogeneity due to distributional changes in socioeconomic indicators such as education and occupation. In this research, we propose an improved method, called the "mobility contrast model" (MCM), that is more efficient and flexible for detecting heterogeneous mobility effects depending on one's origin and/or destination socioeconomic status. We revisited the debate about the mobility effect on fertility and analyzed the data from the classical Occupational Changes in a Generation Study 1962 (OCG-1) and the more recent data from the 1974-2018 General Social Survey (GSS) using both previous models and the MCM. The MCM suggested a small association between fertility and occupational mobility in the GSS data but substantial and heterogeneous educational mobility effects on fertility in the OCG-1 and the GSS. Such effects were difficult to pinpoint using previous methods because mobility effects of different magnitudes and opposite directions among mobility groups may cancel out. The new method can be extended to investigate the differential implications of intergenerational mobility among demographic groups and across multiple generations.

The Intergenerational Foundations of Class Voting: Social Mobility and Electoral Choice in Western Europe

“…We regress voting choice -i.e., our main dependent variable -using a linear probability model, as the latter outperforms logistic regression in case of quasi-complete separation. 5 To test our hypotheses, we leverage on the cutting-edge Mobility Contrast Model (Luo 2021). This method operationalises social mobility as the interaction -in both the theoretical and statistical sense -of individuals' social class (i.e., destination) and parental class (i.e., origin).…”

“…To do so, we adopt an innovative strategy allowing us to identify class-specific mobility effects, thus overcoming the said limitations of previous analyses. More precisely, we account for the horizontal cleavages in the social structure (Oesch 2006a,b) and model mobility effects by means of the newly developed Mobility Contrast Model (Luo 2021). Based on ANOVA, MCM is a flexible tool to study the heterogenous associations between mobility and voting across groups, while holding voters' class and family background (among other factors) constant, though without departing from the well-known framework of OLS.…”