Description

Intergenerational social mobility refers to the relationship between the socio-economic position an individual occupies and the position in which he or she was brought up. Comparative research on intergenerational social mobility has typically entailed comparisons over time and comparisons between countries. Country comparisons, in particular, have been restricted to a relatively small number of countries or have been scarce due to lack of good comparative data. In this paper we extend the country-comparative perspective by studying intergenerational social class mobility across 32 countries in Europe using consistent data from the European Social Survey. In addition to cross-country comparison we investigate over-time changes using a cohort-approach. The first objective of this paper is to give an up-to-date descriptive account of cross-country and over-time differences in absolute and relative mobility rates in Europe. The second aim is to identify the impact of specific institutional or macro-economic features on social mobility rates, thereby advancing understanding of contextual determinants of social mobility.

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