Location: 368A Heady Hall

Description: Carol Shiue
"Social Mobility in the Long-Run: An Analysis with Five Linked Generations in China, 1300-1900"

Abstract: This paper uses a multigenerational perspective to analyze social mobility over the long-run. The data covers information on about 10,000 men who lived in Anhui Province, their wives, and their children, for seven lineages of between fourteen to twenty generations. Among the more than 40,000 individuals in the sample, the earliest recorded birth is in the year 1298, and the last recorded death is in the year 1925. The results show that educational inequality is closely related to changes in mobility over time. Consistent with social and institutional trends during this period, times of greater inequality among men in the father’s generation are times of less mobility in the son’s generation. Heterogeneity in mobility over the distribution of status and asymmetry of mobility at the top and bottom contributes to this observed correlation. I next examine whether lineal or non-lineal effects are more important to son outcomes. The results show that although mobility is a multigenerational process, the lineal impact of grandfathers and older generations is overshadowed by non-lineal interactions coming from higher status men in the same generation as the father.

Contact Person: Juan Carlos Cordoba