Research on the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic positions has been in the limelight of the social sciences for a considerable amount of time. An important question is how institutions affect the opportunities to climb or fall down the socioeconomic ladder and how this changes throughout different stages of economic development. ...
(Show more)Research on the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic positions has been in the limelight of the social sciences for a considerable amount of time. An important question is how institutions affect the opportunities to climb or fall down the socioeconomic ladder and how this changes throughout different stages of economic development. In this context, there is little consensus on whether the industrialization process changed the persistence of socioeconomic status in societies.
This study aims to contribute to the literature in several ways. 1) Unlike many of these studies, which focus on typical success stories during the Industrial Revolution era, we will focus on a region which is in economic decline. Following “one of the most dramatic reversals of fortunes found in European economic history” (Pollard, 1981, 91), the collapse of the once-flourishing West-Flemish linen industry set in motion a century-long process of pauperization. This case study presents an interesting counterfactual to investigate the effects of industrialization on the possibility of socioeconomic mobility: how did intergenerational mobility evolve in an area which remained relatively untouched by the Industrial Revolution? 2) Our goal is also to address a void in Belgian historiography, namely, the surprising lack of quantitative research of a general character in time or geographic range on intergenerational mobility. 3) Last but not least, we want to shed light on the role of women in the mobility process. Because of the restrictive nature of the historical sources, the father-daughter relationship is rarely incorporated in the aforementioned strand of research. Our sample, however, consists of an equal share of male and female observations, which allows us to assess gender-specific differences in opportunities for socioeconomic advancement.
Our dataset is based on the digitization of more than two million birth, marriage and death certificates of the West-Flemish civil register. These documents were then linked both on an intragenerational (birth, marriage, death) and an intergenerational (birth, marriage of the parents) level. Based on the quality of the record linkage and the presence of occupational information, we selected more than 25.000 father-child pairs for whom we believe selection issues to be relatively limited. The marriage certificates contain a considerable amount of information on female employment. The occupational titles were coded using the HISCO (Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations) and PST (primary, secondary, tertiary) coding systems (Van Leeuwen, Maas, & Miles, 2002; Wrigley, 2010). The former allows us to classify the occupations according to the HISCLASS (Historical International Social Class) scheme (Van Leeuwen & Maas, 2011). Social mobility is investigated in mobility matrices using the methodology developed by Long and Ferrie (2013). The PST codes are used to link occupations to the average wages according to economic sector, which can be found in the agricultural and industrial censuses. This allows us to estimate the intergenerational elasticity of earnings (IGE), as is common practice in the field of labor economics. Assessing both social and income mobility, we hope to offer a more inclusive account of the intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status.
(references)
Long, J., & Ferrie, J. (2013). Intergenerational occupational mobility in Great Britain and the United States since 1850. American Economic Review, 103(4), 1109–1137.
Pollard, S. (1981). Peaceful conquest: The industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2002 Reprint)
Van Leeuwen, M. H., & Maas, I. (2011). HISCLASS: A historical international social class scheme. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Van Leeuwen, M. H., Maas, I., & Miles, A. (2002). HISCO: Historical international standard classification of occupations. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Wrigley, E. A. (2010). The PST system of classifying occupations (Tech. Rep.). Cambridge: The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.
(Show less)