Social Mobility and Fertility: The Case of Southern Sweden 1870-2015

Gabriel Brea-Martinez, Centre for Economic Demography-Economic History Lund University
Martin Dribe, Lund University

Socioeconomic status is an important determinant of fertility both in contemporary low-fertility contexts and in high-fertility contexts of historical Western populations. In older scholarship, there was also a large interest in the impact of social mobility on fertility net of the influence of social origin and current social status. This interest waned after the 1980s and since then there has been more focus in the literature on the reverse impact, how fertility in one generation can affect social mobility in the next generation, related to the dilution hypothesis. In addition to socioeconomic status, the experience, or expectation, of social mobility could theoretically have an independent impact on fertility. The problem is to empirically assess such an impact as mobility is a function of both origin and destination. Several models have been suggested in the literature but over time the Diagonal Reference Model (DRM) appears to have become the standard (Sobel 1981, 1985), even though an alternative model, the mobility contrast model (MCM), was recently proposed to better deal with heterogeneous mobility effects (Luo 2022). The aim of this paper is to study the association between social mobility and fertility during the entire fertility transition and into post-transitional society. We use individual-level longitudinal data with intergenerational links covering a period from 1870 to 2015. We apply DRM and MCM to these data to test hypotheses about a direct association between social mobility and fertility net of social origin and social attainment. We study an area in southern Sweden consisting of a port town and five rural or semi-urban parishes. Our first results show a decrease in the background importance over time and that social mobility related more with lower fertility in the past for couples during the fertility transition periods.

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 Presented in Session 45. Long Term Studies on Intergenerational Effects on Mobility and Fertility