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Intergenerational Occupational Mobility across Three Continents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2019

Santiago Pérez
Santiago Pérez*
Affiliation:
Santiago Pérez is Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of California, Davis, 1116 Social Sciences and Humanities, Davis, CA 95616. E-mail: seperez@ucdavis.edu.
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Abstract

I compare rates of intergenerational occupational mobility across four countries in the late nineteenth century: 1869–1895 Argentina, 1850–1880 United States, 1851–1881 Britain, and 1865–1900 Norway. Argentina and the United States had similar levels of intergenerational mobility, and these levels were above those of Britain and Norway. These findings suggest that the higher mobility of nineteenth-century United States relative to Britain might not have been a reflection of “American exceptionalism,” but rather a manifestation of more widespread differences between settler economies of the New World and Europe.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 383 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2019 

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was part of my dissertation completed at Stanford University. I thank my advisor Ran Abramitzky, as well as Arun Chandrasekhar, Victor Lavy, Melanie Morten, and Gavin Wright for outstanding guidance as part of my dissertation committee. I also thank the editor and two anonymous referees for valuable feedback. I have benefitted from feedback from seminar participants at the University of Arizona, PUC Chile, and UC Davis. I acknowledge the financial support of the Stanford University Economics Department, the Economic History Association, the Stanford Center for International Development, and the Leonard W. Ely and Shirley R. Ely Graduate Student Fund Fellowship.

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