The Role of Men and Women in Intergenerational Mobility: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis, 1838-2015

Understanding the processes behind the intergenerational transfer of economic status (such as income or occupation) is important to understand differences in inequality between societies over time. To address questions of whether differences in mobility between countries are permanent or institution-dependent, one must necessarily take a long-run and comparative approach. This project has, therefore, aimed to shed light on these questions by examining the evolution of intergenerational mobility in the long run and across many different countries. The primary objective of this research project has been to investigate how intergenerational mobility differs among men and women, and how mobility evolves over time. We have placed particular emphasis on the complex interrelationship between intergenerational mobility and marriage institutions. By sorting individuals into families, marriage plays a critical role in the transmission of human capital and wealth across generations. We have documented that there is variation across countries in how the marriage gap between skilled and unskilled women has evolved over time. Follow-up work includes an in-depth study about the relationship between female labor force participation and intergenerational mobility, using a novel theoretical framework and data from Norway. The project has shown how intergenerational mobility in Norway changed with industrialization and provided new results on occupational mobility across more than two generations. Furthermore, we have examined the interaction between marriage patterns and economic factors both in Norway and the U.S., and the relative roles of class and gender in the determination of voting patterns. An international workshop was held in Oslo on 20 and 21 June 2019. A total of 19 papers/projects were presented, of which 18 by participants from outside Norway. The workshop included lively and productive discussion and helped strengthen the network of scholars working on these topics.

The project has contributed to an improvement of the understanding of intergenerational mobility, marital matching and gender inequality in the long run. Such historical understanding is valuable in itself, but it can also help improve policies designed to reduce inequalities, both with respect to family background and gender, and to better understand how these processes operate today. Comparing Norway to other countries gives valuable insight into the so-called "Scandinavian model"; why and how Norway (and other Scandinavian countries) have combined a high level of growth with a large level of redistribution and relatively low inequality. The workshop on intergenerational mobility, gender and family formation in the long run (June 2019) contributed to international cooperation within this field and all project participants have benefited from the career development that the project has facilitated.

The distinguishing feature of the proposed work is the calculation of intergenerational elasticities not only between fathers and sons (as is done in most of the literature), but also between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, and mothers and daughters. These calculations typically require the use of longitudinal data sets that link sons and daughters to their parents. Such data are not consistently available over extended periods of time. Moreover, while historical longitudinal data sets based on census data that link fathers and sons are now publicly available for a number of countries, it is not possible to apply exactly the same procedure to daughters because women change last names upon marriage. The project applies and extends a methodology originally developed in Olivetti and Paserman (2015). The key advantage of this approach is that it makes it possible to calculate intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both genders. The key insight of this approach is that the information about socio-economic status conveyed by first names can be used to create a pseudo-link not only between fathers and sons, but also between fathers and daughters. Moreover, we will show how the methodology can be extended to calculate the effect of mother's human capital, as reflected by her pre-marital occupation, on her offspring, even if married mothers do not participate in the labor force. Using this approach we can obtain comparable estimates of intergenerational mobility over many years and across countries. In addition, we can study the role of marriage and other institutions, as well as economic development, in the transmission of economic status across multiple generations. We will put special focus on the comparison between Norway and the United States, as these two countries currently sit at the opposite extremes of the spectrum of international estimates of intergenerational mobility.