Intergenerational occupational transmission as a determinant of social mobility

Abstract

Social mobility is an interdisciplinary field that studies the degree to which an individual's wellbeing is determined by that of the household she grew up in. While sociologists have extensively analyzed the link between parents and children's occupations, understood as indicators of social class, economists have chosen to focus on other socioeconomic attributes such as education or income. This work bridges the gap between these two branches of the literature by characterizing the transmission of occupational attributes from parents to children in the methodological framework provided by modern economic analysis on intergenerational mobility. I leverage two Argentine retrospective surveys to provide estimates of the effects of general attributes of the occupations of parents on those of their offspring. The empirical strategy features traditional ordinary least squares regressions as well as an instrumental variables approach and unconditional quantile regressions. My results indicate that job skill level and occupational socioeconomic status are strongly transmitted from parents to children, while other attributes such as rank, establishment size and industry show strong intergenerational correlation that weakens once the instrumental variable is incorporated. Quantile regressions suggest that intergenerational occupational persistence is driven by occupations with the highest socioeconomic status. Overall, these results imply sizable transmission of occupational attributes, which acts as a key determinant of the social mobility level and severely limits equality of opportunity.

Keywords: social mobility, intergenerational transmission, occupational mobility, labor market