OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers
This series is designed to make available to a wider readership selected labour market, social policy and migration studies prepared for use within the OECD. Authorship is usually collective, but principal writers are named. The papers are generally available only in their original language - English or French - with a summary in the other.
- ISSN: 1815199X (online)
- https://doi.org/10.1787/1815199X
The Welfare Effects of Social Mobility
The question whether a socially mobile society is conducive to subjective well-being (SWB) has
rarely been investigated. This paper fills this gap by analyzing the SWB effects of intergenerational
earnings mobility and equality in education at the societal level. Using socio-demographic information on
44 000 individuals in 30 OECD countries obtained from the World Values Survey, this study shows that
living in a socially mobile society is conducive to individual life satisfaction. Differentiating between
perceived and actual social mobility, we find that both exert rather independent effects, particularly in their
interplay with income inequality. We identify a positive interaction of perceived social mobility that
mitigates its overall SWB lowering effect, supporting Alesina et al. (2004). In contrast, a high degree of
actual social mobility yields an overall impact of income inequality that is SWB lowering, while for low
social mobility the effect of inequality is positive. These interactions hold stronger for pre-transfer than
post-transfer income inequality. Actual social mobility appears to be appreciated only by conservative
persons, while leftist oriented individuals are indifferent. Robustness is tested using a world sample.
JEL:
J62: Labor and Demographic Economics / Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers / Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility;
D63: Microeconomics / Welfare Economics / Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement;
I31: Health, Education, and Welfare / Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty / General Welfare; Well-Being;
A14: General Economics and Teaching / General Economics / Sociology of Economics;
D31: Microeconomics / Distribution / Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions