Seminar in Public Economics - The name says it all: Multigenerational social mobility in Basel (Switzerland), 1550-2019
Time
Thursday, 1. July 2021
12:00 - 13:15
Location
online
Organizer
Speaker:
Melanie Häner (University of Luzern)
The name says it all: Multigenerational social mobility in Switzerland, 1550-2019
(with Christoph A. Schaltegger)
Abstract: Social mobility is a key element of meritocratic societies. We analyze multigenerational social mobility with a hand-collected yearly Basel dataset from 1550 to 2019. With our surname-based approach, we measure Basel society’s overall permeability over more than 450 years. Furthermore, we can provide insights into the respective influence of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. We measure an average parent-child persistence rate of about 0.4 over 15 generations, given the additional effect of grandparents of about 0.2. We 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 additional influence of the grandparental generation but not for earlier generations. 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.