Socioeconomic Mobility in Italy

This thesis is composed by three chapters dealing with the analysis of socioeconomic mobility in Italy. Socioeconomic mobility refers to people's movements through the social ladder. It can be thought in two different perspectives: intergenerational and intragenerational. The first chapter provides an analysis of the level of intergenerational mobility in Italy using the Survey on Household Income and Wealth data (SHIW) (1998-2010). Intergenerational mobility considers the position of the individual in the social hierarchy in relation to that of his/her parents at a similar point in his/her life. The chapter studies the evolution of the intergenerational mobility in terms of educational attainment and occupational status. The second chapter deals with the study of intragenerational income mobility in Italy for the period 1987- 2010. The analysis provides two new methodologies based on the estimate of the nonlinear specification of the Markovian model. These methodologies are applied to a large sample of Italian individuals drawn from the SHIW dataset. In this chapter, it is also proposed a preliminary analysis of the relationship between income mobility and income inequality. The analysis of income mobility should take into account that household survey data are likely to measure income with errors. Indeed, measurement error exaggerates the extent income mobility. The last chapter of this thesis tries to establish if the dataset used in the empirical analysis is affected by measurement error and if this error is classical or not. This analysis should help to acquire a better understanding both of the problems concerning measurement error and.