Mobility: A Critical Appraisal

This paper deals with the methodological and statistical problems that have arisen in the literature which analyzes social and economic mobility. These problems are considered in the context of both simulated data and Danish mobility data on social classes and earnings. We first show that traditional methods used in the analysis of mobility tables will produce biased and, hence, unreliable estimates of the model's parameters if there are individual attributes that can be observed by the researcher like ability, for example. We also show that the schemata that are used to define social classes based on occupational groupings can be tested using classical statistical methods. Using Danish mobility data we found that there were plausible situations where these schemata are rejected by the data. A model of income was developed whose structural parameters could be estimated consistently. This was then estimated on a Danish longitudinal data base in which respondents were surveyed in 1976 and again in 2000. The main conclusions are that household income depends significantly on parental background variables and in spite of the fact that Denmark has many universal social programmes devoted to improving the welfare of its citizens the children of disadvantaged households are much less likely to succeed than the children of parents which are more affluent and have better educational backgrounds.