Analyses of Intergenerational Mobility

• Author: Florencia Torche
• Published date: 01 January 2015
• Date: 01 January 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716214547476
• Subject Matter: Section I: The State of Knowledge about Mobility

ANNALS, AAPSS, 657, January 2015 37

DOI: 10.1177/0002716214547476

Analyses of

Intergenera-

tional Mobility:

An

Interdisciplinary

Review

By

FLORENCIA TORCHE

547476ANN The Annals of the American AcademyAnalyses of Intergenerational Mobility

research-article2014

This article reviews the sociological and economic lit-

erature on intergenerational mobility. Findings on

social class, occupational status, earnings, and income

mobility are discussed and discrepancies among them

are evaluated. The review also examines nonlinearities

in the intergenerational association, variation in mobil-

ity across advanced industrial countries, and recent

mobility trends in the United States. The literature

suggests an association between inequality and eco-

nomic mobility at the country level, with the United

States featuring higher inequality and lower mobility

than other advanced industrial countries. However,

mobility has not declined in the United States over the

recent decades in which inequality has expanded. The

inequality-mobility relationship fails to emerge when

occupational measures of mobility are used, likely

because these measures do not fully capture some

mechanisms of economic reproduction.

Keywords: class mobility; income mobility; social

inequality; equality of opportunity

Intergenerational Mobility:

Definition and Measures

Social scientists operationalize mobility as the

extent and pattern of association between par-

ents’ and adult children’s socioeconomic

Florencia Torche is an associate professor of sociology

at NYU. She is also a faculty affiliate at the Steinhardt

School of Education and at the NYU Global Institute of

Public Health. Her scholarship examines how inequal-

ity persists over the life course and across generations.

She has published in outlets such as the American

Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology,

and the Annual Review of Sociology.

NOTE: This article was first presented on June 10,

2013, at the Committee on Population, the National

Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences’

Social Mobility Workshop. The author thanks Robert

Hauser and seminar participants for helpful comments

and suggestions.

38 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

standing, where higher association means less mobility. Socioeconomic standing

is captured by different measures—the most common are social class, occupa-

tional status, individual earnings, and family income. The methodological

approaches used to measure mobility depend on the measure of socioeconomic

attainment used. This article reviews the analysis of mobility based on each one

of these four measures, and briefly discusses the factors accounting for discrep-

ancies among them. I also review nonlinearities in the intergenerational associa-

tion, mobility differences across countries and their potential determinants, and

recent trends in mobility in the United States. While this review focuses on the

parent-children association, the final section briefly describes sibling correlations

as a measure of mobility.

Sociologists favor occupational measures to evaluate intergenerational mobil-

ity while economists focus on earnings and income. The distinction is not just

disciplinary, nor is it trivial. Empirical research shows that findings about levels

of mobility in different countries and trends over time vary depending on the

measure used. While the sociological analysis of class and status mobility dates

back to the 1960s and may have experienced its golden years in the 1970s to

1990s, economic mobility research has burgeoned in the last two decades. Topics

with a long tradition in sociology—for example, mediators of intergenerational

reproduction or the distinction between absolute and relative mobility (e.g., Blau

and Duncan 1967; Sewell and Hauser 1975)—are being tackled anew by econo-

mists (e.g., Eide and Showalter 1999; Bowles and Gintis 2002; Blanden, Gregg,

and Macmillan 2007; Chetty, Hendren, Kline, and Saez 2014). Much mobility

analysis is descriptive and bivariate—no small feat given the methodological chal-

lenges to obtain unbiased estimates—but analysis of “mediating factors” and

variation across time and place are interesting extensions. Much has been learned

about levels, patterns, and trends of mobility. However, the attribution of

causality—to what extent and through which mechanisms family economic stand-

ing affects children’s socioeconomic attainment—is a more challenging task that

researchers are starting to consider.

Occupational Status Mobility

Sociological analysis of mobility relies on occupations, collapsed into highly

aggregated classes or ranked into a one-dimensional status hierarchy. Occupational

status is a weighted average of the mean level of earnings and education of

detailed occupations. Occupational status has important advantages as a measure

of economic standing: collecting information about occupations is relatively easy

and faces fewer issues in terms of recall, reliability, refusal, and stability than

measures of earnings or income (Hauser and Warren 1997). Furthermore, infor-

mation about parents can be reported retrospectively by adult children, circum-

venting the need for long-term panels. Status strongly correlates with other social

and economic variables, and it remains relatively stable over the individual occu-

pational career, so a single measure provides adequate information of long-run

standing (Hauser et al. 2000; Hauser 2010). Some economists have claimed that