PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Melanie Häner
AU  - Christoph A. Schaltegger
TI  - The name says it all Multigenerational social mobility in Basel (Switzerland), 1550–2019
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.0621-11749R2
DP  - 2022 Jan 13
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 0621-11749R2
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2022/01/04/jhr.0621-11749R2.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2022/01/04/jhr.0621-11749R2.full
AB  - We analyze multigenerational social mobility by drawing on a novel hand-collected dataset from Basel (1550–2019) and using a new surname-based approach. We find an average parent-child persistence of about 0.4 and an average grandparent-child persistence of about 0.2 in a three-generational model applied to a time span of more than 450 years. A cyclical pattern indicates that social mobility was lowest in wartime generations, with spreading afterward. We measure a statistically significant additional influence of the grandparental generation but not of earlier generations. This reveals the importance of multigenerational analyses to examine equal opportunities in society.