Climbing up Ladders and Sliding down Snakes: An Empirical Assessment of the Effect of Social Mobility on Subjective Wellbeing

Paul Dolan () and Grace Lordan
Additional contact information
Paul Dolan: London School of Economics

No 12519, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We examine how intergenerational mobility affects subjective wellbeing (SWB) using data from the British Cohort Study. Our SWB measures encapsulates both life satisfaction and mental health, and we consider both relative and absolute movements in income. We find that relative income mobility is a significant predictor of life satisfaction and mental health, whether people move upward or downward. For absolute income, mobility is only a consistent predictor of SWB and mental health outcomes if the person moves downwards, and in this case the impact is far larger than relative mobility. For both relative and income mobility downward movements affect SWB to a greater extent than upward movements, consistent with notions of loss aversion. Notably, we find that social class mobility does not affect SWB. We present evidence that the significant relative and absolute mobility effects we find operate partially through financial perceptions and consumption changes which can occur because of income mobility.

Keywords: life satisfaction; intergenerational mobility; loss aversion; social class mobility; relative income; income mobility; SWB; subjective wellbeing; mental health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I1 J60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2019-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hap, nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Review of Economics of the Household, 2021, 19, 1023–1045

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12519.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Climbing up ladders and sliding down snakes: an empirical assessment of the effect of social mobility on subjective wellbeing (2021)
Working Paper: Climbing up ladders and sliding down snakes: an empirical assessment of the effect of social mobility on subjective wellbeing (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12519

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().