The name says it all. Multigenerational social mobility in Switzerland, 1550-2019

Melanie Häner and Christoph Schaltegger

VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Social mobility is a key element of meritocratic societies. We analyze multigenerational social mobility with a hand-collected yearly Swiss dataset from 1550 to 2019. With our surname-based approach, we measure the Swiss society's overall permeability over more than 450 years. Furthermore, we can provide insights into the distinct influence of the respective parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. We measure an average persistence rate of 0.42 over 15 generations and show how close the different social status indicators match with each other. A cyclical pattern indicates that social mobility was lowest in wartime generations with a spreading afterwards. Furthermore, we measure a significant influence of the grandparental generation but not for earlier generations. A purely two-generation view thus overestimates persistence. This reveals the importance of multigenerational social mobility analyses to examine equal opportunities in society. Overall, we conclude that our surname-based approach is suitable to investigate society's multigenerational permeability.

Keywords: multigenerational social mobility; education; wealth; guilds; surnames (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J62 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc21:242355

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