Intergenerational occupational mobility in India

In this paper, [the authors] examine the intergenerational occupational mobility in India among men born during 1945-85. Following Long and Ferrie (2013, American Economic Review), [the authors] not only distinguish between prevalence and association, but also use the Altham Statistics - which involves comparison of all possible odds ratios, for example, the odds that the son of a white collar father would get a white collar job compared with the odds that the son of a low-skilled father would get a white collar job - as a measure of distance between son-father occupation associations across cohorts. [The authors] extend the analysis to the differences in mobility across social groups, and attempt to isolate the specific odds ratios that account for the largest part of the difference. [The authors] find no evidence of difference in mobility in successive 10 year birth cohorts; however, looking at the longer time period (birth cohort 1945-54 vs. 1975-84), [the authors] find that the mobility in the 1975-84 birth cohort is higher than the mobility in the 1945-54 birth cohort. Although the mobility among Scheduled Castes/Tribes (SC/STs) in the 1945-64 birth cohort was not different than the mobility observed in the entire 1945-64 birth cohort, SC/STs born during 1965-84 experienced a higher mobility when compared with the entire 1965-84 birth cohort. Similarly, when compared with the higher castes, SC/STs experienced lower mobility in the 1945-64 birth cohort; however, the mobility among SC/STs has been higher than the mobility among higher castes in the 1965-84 birth cohort.

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