Abstract
Measuring intergenerational mobility is essential to understanding how social and economic (dis-)advantages persist across generations. To this aim, the present study leverages high quality microdata from an administrative-survey linked dataset for Italy (AD-SILC) to estimate the sibling correlation of permanent earnings for Italians born between 1981 and 1988. We thus fill an important gap in the literature on intergenerational mobility in Italy – well known to be a low-mobility country – by providing updated estimates for a measure of family influence that is more comprehensive than well studied income correlations and elasticities. Overall, our findings confirm the relevance of family background in Italy: in comparative perspective, Italy is close to low-mobility countries such as the US. Consistent with evidence from other countries, we find that family background has a stronger influence on brothers than on sisters. However, unlike in the U.S., where family background exerts a much greater impact at the top, our findings for Italy reveal higher sibling correlation among those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, suggesting a "sticky floor" effect as a key driver of low mobility. Additionally, we underscore the importance of certain estimation assumptions: accounting for periods with zero earnings and modeling residuals as an autoregressive process significantly influence the estimated results.
Massimo Aprea is a postdoc at Sapienza University of Rome, where he obtained his PhD in Economics. His research focuses on poverty measurement, economic inequality, intergenerational mobility and on the role of minimum income schemes. Among his last publication is “Income inequality in times of high inflation in Europe” (SCED) with M.Raitano.
Filippo Gioachin is a Postdoctoral researcher in Sociology at the University of Trento.
He studies social stratification, intergenerational mobility and life course socioeconomic inequalities in different institutional contexts. Recent work appears in Social Forces, Sociological Science, European Sociological Review, Social Science Research, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.