Mario Lucchini

CAREER MOBILITY IN ITALY

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of social origins and education for career mobility in contemporary Italy by means of growth curves models. We find that opportunities for career advancement are rather limited and that risks of downward mobility are virtually negligible. Although this picture displays a noticeable degree of stability over time, a moderate increase of career fluidity across cohorts can be detected. Moreover, social origins and education exert a marked influence on the first occupation, while the subsequent career-adjustment of these initial social inequalities is rather limited. Furthermore, the small influence of origins and education on career opportunities does not display any systematic trend across cohorts.

CAREER MOBILITY IN ITALY: A growth curves analysis of occupational attainment in the twentieth century

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of social origins and education for career mobility in contemporary Italy by means of growth curves models. We find that opportunities for career advancement are rather limited and that risks of downward mobility are virtually negligible. Although this picture displays a noticeable degree of stability over time, a moderate increase of career fluidity across cohorts can be detected. Moreover, social origins and education exert a marked influence on the first occupation, while the subsequent career-adjustment of these initial social inequalities is rather limited. Furthermore, the small influence of origins and education on career opportunities does not display any systematic trend across cohorts.

Multidimensional Deprivation in Contemporary Switzerland Across Social Groups and Time

We have investigated the phenomenon of deprivation in contemporary Switzerland through the adoption of a multidimensional, dynamic approach. By applying Self Organizing Maps (SOM) to a set of 33 non-monetary indicators from the 2009 wave of the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), we identified 13 prototypical forms (or clusters) of well-being, financial vulnerability, psycho-physiological fragility and deprivation within a topological dimensional space. Then new data from the previous waves (2003 to 2008) were classified by the SOM model, making it possible to estimate the weight of the different clusters in time and reconstruct the dynamics of stability and mobility of individuals within the map. Looking at the transition probabilities between year t and year t+1, we observed that the paths of mobility which catalyze the largest number of observations are those connecting clusters that are adjacent on the topological space.

Il benessere e la deprivazione delle famiglie italiane

This essay tries to develop the multidimensional perspective to the investigation of social exclusion using a new version of clustering procedures, based on neural networks techniques. Our central aim is to make a fuzzy map of the Italian Well-Being compressing a certain number of indicators as regards as basic lifestyle, subjective well-being, health conditions, social relations, housing problems, durable lack onto a two-dimensional fuzzy space. More specifically we use the Kohonen Map, an unsupervised clustering procedure, to realise a topological segmentation of Italian families onto a two dimensional display along which it is possible to identify differential groups of families featured by different standards of living. The fuzzy Map is made of prototypical cluster each of which recognise families (and individuals) featured by a particular combination of deprivation and well-being indicators. Families (or individuals) situated in a closeness tend to share similar characteristics, while families (farther) in the fuzzy map show pronounced differences. We make use of the Multiscopo ISTAT dataset (2001) to explore the structure of correlations among the indicators and to recognise different forms and level of vulnerability and social exclusion. With multilevel logistic regression models we will demonstrate how education, employment status and life events continue to be powerful predictors of the multiple deprivation and of the social exclusion in Italy although with significant variations across geographical regions.

Happiness and health

Studies concerning the determinants of subjective well-being (SWB), conducted in several countries and based on different datasets and methods, have all shown that health is one of the strongest predictors of individual happiness. However, more work is necessary in order to determine whether this relationship is a truly causal one and to unravel the temporal dynamics of the effect of health on SWB. In this chapter we aim, first of all, to provide an accurate estimate of the effect of self-assessed health on SWB by using the Swiss Household Panel dataset and panel data models that enable us to get rid of unobserved heterogeneity, which represents the main obstacle in models trying to estimate causal effects. As a second objective, we focus on the study of the temporal dynamics underlying the emergence of happiness and the relationship between happiness and health. We are interested in clarifying: (a) whether people are able to fully adjust to past health circumstances as well as to past life events and (b) whether SWB is autoregressive. In other terms, we investigated the existence of general and specific habituation in SWB. In this chapter we applied a FE model in order to investigate specific habituation channels and a GMM model in order to understand whether life satisfaction (our indicator of SWB) is autoregressive. In conclusion our models confirm the strong association between health and SWB revealed by previous studies. Both the FE and the GMM model prove that current health is a strong predictor of SWB.

Genetic and environmental contributions to life satisfaction

In recent decades a great deal of research about the nature and causes of subjective well-being (SWB) has emerged. Economists, psychologists and sociologists have unravelled the socioeconomic and psychological determinants of SWB, often forgetting or underestimating the role of genetic factors in accounting for the relative stability in SWB over the life span. This chapter offers a contribution to the research in this field by providing a robust estimate of the role of genetic endowment in the explanation of the self-reported level of life satisfaction. The empirical analysis is performed by applying a model of variance decomposition (ACE multilevel model) to a large dataset that entails family data coming from waves 2010, 2011 and 2012 of the ISTAT-Multipurpose Survey on Households. The heritability estimate for satisfaction with life (that’s to say, the proportion of the phenotypic variance ‘explained’ by the additive genetic factors) is equal to 45 per cent, an estimate that appears to be in line with those obtained by studies on twins. The specificity component, which captures a combination of measurement error and unique environmental influences, is around 41 per cent, while the influence exerted by the shared environment is rather small but not marginal (14 per cent), in contrast to other studies that give zero weight to this component. These robust estimates suggest that informative genetic designs derived from behavioural genetics can support social sciences in their attempt to develop a more systematic understanding of SWB.

Social capital and life satisfaction in Switzerland

This paper investigates the causal relationship running from some crucial social capital indicators to life satisfaction using linear panel data models (fixed-effects, random effects) on data coming from 12 waves (1999-2012) of Swiss Household Panel (SHP). The positive association between indicators of social capital - particularly trust with people, friendships, participation in voluntary associations - and life satisfaction has been widely proven in the literature although most of these studies adopt standard regression models and cross-sectional data leading to spurious conclusion. The panel nature and the rich information provided in the SHP allows to control for time constant unobserved characteristics, such as personality traits, and for most covariates that have been proven to influence life satisfaction. Overall, this study suggests that informal relationships and trust are the most important social capital indicators in terms of their effects on life satisfaction. Gender related differences are also apparent, in that the emotional support received from relatives or friends is a far better predictor of life satisfaction for women than for men.

Career mobility in Italy: a growth curves analysis of occupational attainment over the 20th century

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of social origins and education for career mobility in contemporary Italy by means of growth curves models. We find that opportunities for career advancement are rather limited and that risks of downward mobility are virtually negligible. Although this picture displays a noticeable degree of stability over time, a moderate increase of career fluidity across cohorts can be detected. Moreover, social origins and education exert a marked influence on the first occupation, while the subsequent career-adjustment of these initial social inequalities is rather limited. Furthermore, the small influence of origins and education on career opportunities does not display any systematic trend across cohorts.