Moving targets? Life-course dynamics in intergenerational mobility

<p>Research on intergenerational mobility assumes that individuals reach occupational maturity, typically around age 35, allowing occupational positions to be treated as stable destinations and mobility to be summarized by a single estimate. We argue that this assumption is difficult to reconcile with contemporary occupational careers. If occupational positions continue to evolve throughout adulthood, intergenerational mobility may itself be a life-course process rather than a fixed parameter. Using retrospective occupational histories from 27 European countries and the United States, we first show that occupational mobility commonly extends well beyond the age conventionally assumed to mark occupational maturity. We then analyze Swedish population register data, estimating parent–offspring associations across every combination of parental and offspring ages between 27 and 56. Rather than converging to a stable value, intergenerational associations vary systematically over the life course, peaking in mid-adulthood before declining. These findings challenge the view that age-related variation primarily reflects measurement error. Instead, they suggest that intergenerational mobility is continuously reshaped by intragenerational mobility over the life course, raising the more fundamental question of whether there exists a single intergenerational mobility parameter to recover.</p>