The beneficial impact of mother’s work on children’s absolute income mobility, Southern Sweden (1947-2015)

This paper examines the influence of mothers’ employment on children’s economic mobility in a period when women’s labor market participation was still increasing, and it was still was far from common for a mother to be in paid work. It focuses on a period of transition for women’s labor market participation in Sweden, when mothers faced higher barriers to employment. The findings show that intergenerational income associations indicate that the mother’s income did not influence her children directly, in line with the results of most studies on this topic. Nevertheless, I also found that these traditional measures of income mobility failed to capture the important effects of maternal paid labor on children’s income mobility. By using extremely rich longitudinal data from Southern Sweden, I studied the trends in children’s absolute upward mobility (i.e., earning more than their fathers). I found that whether a mother was in paid work, was economically independent, and had an income similar to that of the father – which is a proxy for economic autonomy – during the late childhood and adolescence of her children had substantial effects on her children’s upward economic mobility, and especially on that of her daughters.