Correlating Social Mobility and Economic Outcomes

Abstract

We construct comparable measures of intergenerational mobility (IM) for 103 Italian provinces using the methodology of Güell et al. (2007, 2015a) and explore their correlation with a variety of social and economic outcomes. We find that higher IM is positively associated with economic activity, education and social capital and negatively correlated with inequality. Moreover, there is no clear pattern of correlation with other socio-political variables. These results are qualitatively similar to Chetty et al. (2014), with the important difference that Italy is a highly centralised state where institutions and policies are ‘de jure’ the same in all provinces. This suggests that something beyond institutional and policy differences also shapes intergenerational mobility.