Does Intergenerational Educational Mobility Shape the Well-Being of Young Europeans? Evidence from the European Social Survey

Using pooled European Social Survey data (Rounds 4–7, 2008–2014), we investigate the relationship between intergenerational educational mobility and subjective well-being (SWB) for young Europeans (N = 16,050 individuals aged 25–34 from 18 countries). Previous research has been struggling with inconclusive results due to the methodological challenge of disentangling the independent (i.e., ‘net’) effect of social mobility over and above the effects of social origin and destination. We contribute to this line of research by contrasting mobility effects estimated in a conventional linear regression framework with net mobility effects estimated by (non-linear) diagonal mobility models (DMM). We show how model selection influences estimates of mobility effects and how different specifications lead to radically different findings. Using DMM, we estimate how intergenerational educational mobility affects the SWB of young Europeans, differentiating between downward and upward mobility and different country groups. Our results suggest that status loss/gain across generations affects young adults’ SWB in addition to the level-effect of ending up in a lower/higher status position only in Continental Europe.