Regional comparisons of intergenerational social mobility: the importance of positional mobility.

In this paper, I show how the decomposition of intergenerational persistence indicators into their structural and positional components allows to gain a better understanding of the determinants of the heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility at the subnational level. The crucial element for the separate analysis of positional and structural mobility is the use of regionally defined instead of nationally defined quantiles. This constitutes a departure of the current consensus in the estimations of mobility rates at the subnational level in economics. Using the Mexican case as an example, I show that in terms of positional mobility, there are no significant differences across the regions of the country. This contrast with the existing results and their interpretations, particularly regarding intergenerational mobility in the south region of the country. This highlights the importance of incorporating positional measures into the battery of tools used for intranational analysis. https://zenodo.org/record/7368347 https://zenodo.org/record/7368403 https://zenodo.org/record/7368421 https://zenodo.org/record/7368423 https://zenodo.org/record/7368436 https://zenodo.org/record/7368441 https://zenodo.org/record/7373355 https://zenodo.org/record/7373363 https://zenodo.org/record/737338