Subjective Social Mobility: The Role of Job Characteristics and Social Context

• In Event: 589 - Regular Session. The Experience of Social Mobility

Abstract

Quantitative studies of subjective social mobility are scarce. In this paper I use the 2009 ISSP data and a HLM analysis in order to examine what are the determinants of subjective sense of intergenerational social mobility. I find that the effect of job characteristics, namely supervising of other workers and union membership has a strong and significant effect on subjective mobility even after controlling for objective measurement of mobility. In contrast, country social context have only little to no effect at all except for some evidence for the effect of inequality, as measured by GINI coefficient. The results suggest that that people own perspective of mobility may help us to understand inter status variation in social mobility.

Author

• Eyal Bar-Haim, Tel Aviv University