Mobility Regimes and Generative Mechanisms: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and the United States

The purpose of this paper is to carry out a comparative analysis of the intergenerational mobility regimes observed in Italy and the United States in the middle of the 1980s. First, I propose a theoretical model that accounts for mobility propensities in terms of underlying generative mechanisms. This model is then operationalized, translated into a hybrid log-linear model for frequencies, and fitted to the pertinent mobility tables to verify whether (a) the observed data offer evidence in favour of the existence of the hypothesized mechanisms; and (b) cross-sex and/or cross-national dissimilarities in the action of such mechanisms do exist. The analysis shows that (a) all the hypothesized mechanisms contribute to generating the observed mobility regimes; (b) general resources and the objective desirability of classes account for: most of the variation in mobility propensities observed in the two countries under study; (c) in both countries, men and women are characterized by the same mobility regime, except that women are less likely to inherit their father's business; (d) compared with the United States, Italy is characterized by a, substantially higher degree of class inequality in terms of mobility chances