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Over the past 50 years, occupational segregation by gender has markedly declined in the United States. This paper uses data from the decennial censuses and the National Longitudinal Surveys from 1967 to 2013 to explore how trends over time in the occupational gender composition of women’s jobs vary according to educational attainment. The paper also examines the relative contributions of inter-generational and intra-generational occupational mobility to changes in occupational gender composition over time for high school educated women and women with a bachelor’s degree. The findings indicate that for women with a bachelor’s degree, declines in the likelihood of working in a female dominated occupation are primarily due to changes across cohorts. High school educated women experience smaller changes across cohorts but are more likely than women with a bachelor’s degree to move to gender integrated occupations over the course of their careers. Fixed effects models show that the changes over the life course reflect changes in the gender composition of individual women’s occupations rather than changes in the composition of the labor force. Both occupational mobility across and within broad groups of occupations contribute to changes in the occupational gender composition for high school educated women; for women with a bachelor’s degree, mobility across broad groups of occupations is most important.

The aim of this paper is to bridge the gaps in existing accounts of the evolution of intergenerational social mobility in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The study makes a potentially valuable contribution to the literature by extending the spectrum of institutional and historical contexts, in which (in)equality of opportunity has been considered so far, and a chance to re-examine existing evidence by using alternative datasets and a slightly different methodology. Following the conventions in the social mobility literature in this study I approach social destinations and social origins in terms of educational and occupational attainments of children and their parents respectively. For empirical part I utilize data from four representative cross-national surveys conducted in Russia in 1994, 2002, 2006 and 2013. To study historical change in the patterns of social mobility I identify four cohorts whose educational and occupational careers unfolded during four different historical periods (two for the Soviet and two for the post-Soviet period). Being informed by several earlier studies on post-socialist countries including earlier research on Russia, I anticipated (1) a trend towards lesser (rather than greater) openness in the late years of the Soviet era, (2) a temporary discontinuity of mobility patterns during the turbulent 1990s and (3) the ‘tightening up’ of social mobility regime in the more stable years of Russia’s post-Soviet history. If any such trend existed, my findings would rather suggest that it was directed towards decreasing intergenerational transmission of educational advantage in the post-Soviet era, rather than the other way around. Also, surprisingly and quite contrary to earlier findings and theoretical considerations, the changes in the pattern of occupational mobility remained surprisingly invariant to the changes in historical and institutional context. The paper concludes with highlighting some of the remaining puzzles and possible directions for future research.

Most studies on discrimination against migrants in Chinese cities focus on wage differentials. This paper endeavours to develop an alternative way of explaining the institutional discrimination against migrants by studying workers' job mobility rates in three cities: Beijing, WuXi and Zhuhai. Migrants are commonly perceived to have high occupational mobility; however, Cox proportional hazards regressions in this paper show a different picture. Institutional discrimination reduces the number of jobs available to the migrants, increases their job search costs and the cost of losing jobs. Even though migrants take jobs unacceptable to local residents, the effects of this institutional discrimination still constrain migrants in changing jobs. The regressions show that temporary migrants have longer job durations and shorter unemployment durations than local people or permanent migrants. Moreover, migrants start to change jobs more often only after they have stayed in the city for some time and have accumulated enough assets to be able to survive when unemployed.

This paper employs the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a nationwide panel, to inquire into the magnitude, determinants, and consequences of occupational mobility in Russia from 1985 to 1998. We show that the restructuring process increases the rate of occupational reallocation. Structural changes account for a substantial part of the increase in gross occupational flows. A model built in the paper outlines the major explanatory factors of increased mobility during transition. The empirical analysis demonstrates that the destruction of existing jobs and occupations and the creation of new opportunities are important explanations for increased occupational mobility in transitional Russia. The econometric results also indicate that the local outside opportunities and the scale of structural change largely determine the probability of occupational switching.

Inequality and labour informality are still distinctive characteristics of Latin America. However, most of the countries have succeeded in reversing the upward trends in both informality and inequality in the 1990s. These positive dynamics have been noteworthy in Argentina and Brazil. This paper analyses the processes of labour formalization in these countries and its interrelation with the evolution of income inequality over the 2000s. It contributes to two current debates. The first one refers to the role of labour market flexibilization in employment formalization. The second one is related to the reduction of income inequality. Most of the literature places emphasis on the evolution of the returns to education. This paper complements this approach by analysing the contribution of formalization to the reduction of inequality in these countries.

The paper analyzes effects of occupational and regional mobility on the matching rate using the monthly panel disaggregated on regional and occupational level. The main contribution of the paper is measuring the effect of substitutability between vacancies for different occupations and vacancies in different regions on matchings. The estimates indicate higher regional mobility in West Germany but higher occupational mobility in East Germany. The results show that if occupations were perfect substitutes, the number of matches could increase by 5-9%. Perfect regional mobility could increase matchings by 5-15%. It is also shown that partial aggregation causes a downward bias in substitutability estimates.

This paper employs the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a nationwide panel, to inquire into the magnitude, determinants, and consequences of occupational mobility in Russia from 1985 to 1998. We show that the restructuring process increases the rate of occupational reallocation. Structural changes account for a substantial part of the increase in gross occupational flows. A model built in the paper outlines the major explanatory factors of increased mobility during transition. The empirical analysis demonstrates that the destruction of existing jobs and occupations and the creation of new opportunities are important explanations for increased occupational mobility in transitional Russia. The econometric results also indicate that the local outside opportunities and the scale of structural change largely determine the probability of occupational switching.

Using data from the Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey and unconditional quantile regressions, this paper analyzes gender wage gaps among recent tertiary graduates in South Korea. Unconditional log wage gaps at the mean, 10 th quantile and 90 th quantile are 0.190, 0.146 and 0.239 which are at least half the size of the respective wage gaps among the general population. Aggregate decompositions show that composition effects are similar across the distribution while structural effects are larger further up the distribution, therefore driving wider gaps in high-wage positions. Detailed composition effects show that high school type, field of study, firm size and occupation explain at least 50% of the wage gaps. Major drivers include low rates of women in high school science tracks; university engineering courses; large firms; and manufacturing, sales and trade occupations as well as high rates of women in small firms and administrative, health and social welfare occupations. Lastly, the use of detailed categories for fields of study and occupations is shown to substantially increase the size of composition effects.

This paper studies the connection between multidimensional skill mismatch and labor mobility decisions, and the implications on the aggregate economy thereof. We show empirically that higher skill mismatch induces workers to move to a better matched job. Moreover, labor mobility helps reduce skill mismatch, especially for those previously with high skill mismatch. An equilibrium search model featuring skill mismatch and on the job search is developed. Quantitatively, we find that (i) skill mismatch has an important role to play in affecting the labor mobility decisions, as well as the aggregate economy, (ii) about two-thirds of the total skill mismatch can be accounted for by search frictions, which explain half of the occupational mobility and cost about 1% of the aggregate output and welfare, and (iii) aggregate productivity growth has positive impact on both the skill mismatch and occupational mobility.

This paper considers the equilibrium interaction between within firm and across firm reallocation in the presence of labor market frictions. While a sizable literature has investigated frictional labor markets, it has ignored within firm mobility. Nonetheless, every year a sizable fraction of workers switch occupations without changing firms. Employees in large firms can sample from a larger selection and across firm mobility is replaced by within firm mobility. Bringing together within and across firm reallocation along with labor market frictions, naturally accounts for the observed differences in worker flows and wages across firms of different sizes.

In this paper, we make two novel contributions to the literature on trade and inequality. First, we show that the same mechanism that causes greater cross-sectional inequality, higher relative demand for skill, also facilitates intergenerational occupational mobility. In particular, we develop a stylized model that shows that the innovation induced by international trade causes an increase in the employment share of high-skill occupations. In turn, this allows an increasing number of sons to enter better occupations than their father. We then exploit spatial variation in exposure to trade liberalization in urban India to test our model’s prediction. Our empirical results confirm that sons that live in urban districts with a greater exposure to trade liberalization have a higher probability of being in a better occupation than their father. Further, as predicted by our model, we find that this positive impact of trade liberalization on intergenerational mobility is stronger in relatively technologically advanced districts. In a second contribution, we show that increased investment in education alone need not facilitate intergenerational occupational mobility. Instead, it only does so in urban districts where there has been a sufficient increase in the employment share of high-skill occupations.

This paper studies the effect of family size on parents' labor supply and occupational prestige, using the censuses of both Taiwan and Mainland China. We rely on the exogenous increase in child quantity that results from having twins at the first birth. Our results indicate that an increase in family size has negative effects on the labor supply of mothers but not of fathers, in both Taiwan and Mainland China. In addition, we find that in Taiwan fathers tend to switch to occupations with lower prestige scores in response to an increase in family size. However, the negative effect of family size on occupational prestige is not observed in Mainland China, where the occupational mobility is low.

This paper examines if workers face larger costs from losing their job in a mass layoff whether they were employed in routine-intensive occupations as technological change erodes their employment perspectives outside of their original job. We use worker-level data on mass layoffs in Germany between 1980 and 2010 and provide evidence that workers who were employed in more routine-intensive occupations indeed suffer larger and more persistent earnings losses. We find that earnings losses are primarily due to a reduction in the number of days in employment, suggesting that routine-intensive workers face considerable difficulties in coping with job loss. The additional displacement costs associated with routine intensity have increased over time.

This paper examines whether temporary international migration enables returnees to climb the occupational ladder. Using data from Egypt, we examine the occupational mobility of returnees relative to non-migrants of the same birth cohort. We rely on an instrumental variable approach to control for the endogeneity of the temporary migration decision. We find evidence that return migration increases the probability of upward occupational mobility and leads to larger effects among highly educated returnees. Our results are robust to using a Difference-in-Differences matching technique that controls for unobserved heterogeneity between non-migrants and returnees. Our findings underscore that temporary overseas work experience can alleviate potential brain drain concerns through the human capital enhancement of return migrants.

Summary The last two decades of high economic growth in India has been accompanied by increasing economic inequality. The rise in inequality raises concerns about fall in opportunities for social mobility. This paper examines changes in intergenerational occupational mobility for males in India over three decades (1983–2012). Once we control for changes in occupational structure across the years, we find a decline in intergenerational occupational mobility during 1983–2012 in India. However, the decline in intergenerational occupational mobility was sharper for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, historically deprived sections of the Indian population, than for non-Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

This paper examines the determinants of the wage penalty experienced by undocumented workers, defined as the wage gap between observationally equivalent legal and undocumented immigrants. Using recently developed methods that impute undocumented status for foreign-born persons sampled in microdata surveys, the study documents a number of empirical findings. Although the unadjusted gap in the log hourly wage between the average undocumented and legal immigrant is very large (over 35%), almost all of this gap disappears once the calculation adjusts for differences in observable socioeconomic characteristics. The wage penalty to undocumented immigration for men was only about 4% in 2016. Nevertheless, there is sizable variation in the wage penalty over the life cycle, across demographic groups, across different legal environments, and across labor markets. The flat age-earnings profiles of undocumented immigrants, created partly by slower occupational mobility, implies a sizable increase in the wage penalty over the life cycle; the wage penalty falls when legal restrictions on the employment of undocumented immigrants are relaxed (as with DACA) and rises when restrictions are tightened (as with E-Verify); and the wage penalty responds to increases in the number of undocumented workers in the labor market, with the wage penalty being higher in those states with larger undocumented populations.

This paper argues that, despite a great deal of research on the topic, we have almost no firm knowledge about societal differences in the rates, patterns, and processes of occupational mobility. Insufficient attention has been paid by previous researchers to the problem of standardizing the measurement of occupational status. As a result, the paper demonstrates, existing cross-national comparisons of mobility are virtually invalid. A Standard International Occupational Prestige Scale developed by the author is proposed as a basis for valid cross-national comparison. Properties of the scale are discussed and results achieved with the scale are compared to those based on other occupational scaling procedures.

The main aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly we analyse the effects of educational mismatch on workers’ occupational mobility and secondly, we quantify the contribution of educational mismatch and labour mobility on gender wage inequality. The decomposition of the gender wage gap was controlled by different types of gender segregation. We use matched employer-employee data from 302 hotels in Andalusia. The evidence suggests that not only is external mobility far higher than internal mobility in this sector, but also that it is the main cause of wage inequality. The reason for this is the existence of labour discrimination against women, which manifests as a lack of access to labour improvements under the same conditions as men. Educational mismatch has a limited effect on internal and external mobility. Finally, gender discrimination is the overall cause of gender wage inequality and is mainly due to horizontal segregation and external mobility.

This paper explores the extent to which unskilled internal migrants in the United States were motivated by the possibility of upward occupational mobility. Drawing on the literature on contemporary migrant selection and sorting, I argue that workers with greater potential for occupational upgrading may have selected themselves out of counties with low skill premiums and sorted themselves into counties with high skill premiums. Using linked data from the U.S. Census and county-level wage data, I present results consistent with this argument, with a focus on shorter distance movers. Conditioning on migrant status, I find that unskilled migrants who moved to places with high skill premiums were most likely to upgrade. I offer some evidence that migrant sorting explains much of this result. My results imply that previous research focusing solely on wage gains provides an incomplete picture of the factors motivating east–west migration in nineteenth century America.

Our paper explores the patterns of occupational mobility using a theoretical framework which integrates elements from job matching and human capital theories. We employ a network analysis approach and consider occupations as nodes and flows of individuals moving from one occupation to another as links. By testing a gravity model on data containing working histories of higher education graduates in their first years of employment, we identify factors shaping occupational mobility from their first to second job.

This paper challanges the view that weak work norms in generous welfare states makes them economically unsustainable. I develop a dynamic model of family- transmitted values that has a laissez-faire equilibrium with strong work norms coexisting with a social-insurance equilibrium with weak work norms. While the former has better incentives, the latter induces more intergenerational occupational mobility which improves the allocation of talent and fuels growth. Strong work norms arise as a defensive strategy of parents that aims at perpetuating their occupation along family lines. I present evidence from microdata showing that generous social insurance correlates with high intergenerational occupational mobility and that more mobile individuals endorse weaker work norms.

Traditionally, social scientists have studied socio-economic inequalities mainly by looking at the impact of individuals’ economic, cultural and social capital. Some scholars have recently argued that other types of resources, such as genetic and erotic capital, may also play a role in the processes that lead to the formation of social inequalities. Using a unique longitudinal dataset, the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, this paper explores the impact of facial attractiveness on people's socio-economic standing over the life course. Methodologically, we employ a set of multilevel Growth Curve Models. Two findings clearly stand out from our analysis. Firstly, facial attractiveness does matter, both for men and women, and secondly, its impact is constant over the employment history.

Are labor markets more turbulent now than thirty years ago? Most job and worker flows imply that the answer is “no”, with one exception: occupational mobility, which increased substantially in the United States. This paper remedies the lack of comparable evidence by focusing on France for the years 1982 to 2009. After correcting for various statistical biases and discrepancies that affect the measurement of occupational mobility, it documents this reallocation process overall and in different subgroups. The data reveal that, over the period considered, the fraction of workers switching occupation exhibits no trend in the aggregate because changing demographics mask increases in mobility within several age and education groups. After taking these composition effects into account, occupational mobility increased sharply in France as well.

In this paper, I document trends in women's occupational mobility between 1980 and 2007 in the U.S labor market, and link these trends to two distinct sources: compositional and structural changes. In this context, compositional changes refers to the over time trends in the distributions of men and women in the occupational wage hierarchy, while structural changes are the trends in the relative standing of occupations in the wage hierarchy over time. The findings provide empirical evidence for both processes, indicating that the impressive upward occupational mobility of American women is a consequence not only of their increased access to highly paid occupations, but also of the higher wage increments in their typical occupational profiles relative to men's—a structural change not often acknowledged by sociologists.

In this paper we explore the linkages among various types of person-organization (PO) fit and their effects on employee attitudinal outcomes. We propose and test a conceptual model which links various types of fits—objective fit, perceived fit and subjective fit—in a hierarchical order of cognitive information processing and relate them to employee organizational commitment and job satisfaction. By unveiling how the different types of fit relate to each other in influencing individual outcomes, we address some of the theoretical and methodological concerns in the use of different methods in measuring PO fit.

The traditional lifelong organizational career model no longer remains relevant for many workers, particularly those active in the knowledge economy. Instead these workers are claimed to pursue boundaryless and protean careers. This paper explores management and IT consultants’ experiences and perceptions of career mobility in the UK and the USA. The findings from this multi-level study reveal that the permeation of organizational boundaries among these workers is characterized by a somewhat segmented spectrum of boundary-crossing behavior. The exploration of this form of career mobility demonstrates that inter-organizational mobility should not be dislocated from other types of career mobility when analyzing career behavior among these workers. In addition, the findings also highlight the role that inter-organizational relations and/or national institutional context play in shaping career patterns in these contemporary forms of work.

Why do workers change occupations? This paper investigates occupational mobility and its determinants following a large unexpected shock (communism's collapse in 1989.) Our calculations show that from 1989 to 1995 between 35 and 50% of Estonian workers changed occupations (classified at one- and four-digits, respectively.) Among the main determinants of occupational mobility we find firm tenure, labour market experience and returns to alternative occupations. We investigate the role of gender and ethnicity and find strong results for the former, with mobility mainly driven by push factors for males (returns to current occupations) and by pull factors for females (returns to alternative occupations).

The purpose of this paper is to assess intergenerational occupational mobility in Germany. Using data from the Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), we find a high persistence of occupational choices across fathers and children. To separate effects related to parental advice and influence (nurture) from genetic factors (nature), we determine the persistence separately for children who grew up with their biological fathers and those who did not. The results suggest that nurture-related effects explain a significant fraction of the observed correlation of fathers’ and children’s occupational choices. We discuss policy implications that follow from the analysis.

In this paper, we examine the intergenerational occupational mobility in India among men born during 1945-85. Following Long and Ferrie (2013, American Economic Review), we not only distinguish between prevalence and association, but also use the Altham Statistics – which involves comparison of all possible odds ratios, for example, the odds that the son of a white collar father would get a white collar job compared with the odds that the son of a low-skilled father would get a white collar job – as measure of distance between son-father occupation associations across cohorts. We extend the analysis to the differences in mobility across social groups, and attempt to isolate the specific odds ratios that account for the largest part of the difference. We find no evidence of difference in mobility in successive ten year birth cohorts; however, looking at the longer time period (birth cohort 1945-54 vs. 1975-84), we find that the mobility in the 1975-84 birth cohort is higher than the mobility in the 1945-54 birth cohort. Although the mobility among Scheduled Castes/Tribes (SC/STs) in the 1945-64 birth cohort was not different than the mobility observed in the entire 1945-64 birth cohort, SC/STs born during 1965-84 experienced a higher mobility when compared with the entire 1965-84 birth cohort. Similarly, when compared with the higher castes, SC/STs experienced lower mobility in the 1945-64 birth cohort; however, the mobility among SC/STs has been higher than the mobility among higher castes in the 1965-84 birth cohort.

This paper presents evidence on intergenerational educational and occupational mobility in Rural China over a period of 14 years (1988-2002). To understand whether the estimated intergenerational persistence can be driven solely by unobserved heterogeneity, we implement biprobit sensitivity analysis (Altonji et al. (2005)) and heteroskedasticity based identification of Klein and Vella (2009). The empirical results show that there have been dramatic improvements in occupational mobility from agriculture to non-farm occupations; a farmer’s children are not any more likely to become farmers in 2002, even though there was significant persistence in occupation choices in 1988. In contrast, the intergenerational mobility in educational attainment has remained largely unchanged for daughters, and it has deteriorated significantly for sons. There is strong evidence of a causal effect of parental education on a son’s schooling in 2002. We provide some possible explanations for the dramatic divergence between occupational and educational mobility in rural China from 1988 to 2002.

This paper shows that there are severe measurement errors regarding the occupational affiliations in the German Socio-Economic Panel. These errors are traced back to the survey structure: in years where occupational information is gathered from the entire employed population instead of only from those declaring job or labor market status changes, average occupational mobility is around five times higher. In order to construct reliable occupational affiliation data, a correction method based on related job or labor market status changes is proposed. The corrected occupational mobility patterns are then analyzed for different samples.

This paper explores the extent to which temporary Mexican migrants upgrade their skills while working in the United States. The vast majority of the migration that we observe is undertaken without documents. In contrast to Lacuesta (2006), we find that labor market performance in Mexico is positively related to one's accumulated migration experience in the United States. Self-selection of high-skilled individuals into migration does not drive this result. We also investigate the possible mechanisms by which migration experience might improve earnings in Mexico. We find support for the notion that migration experience improves labor market outcomes by improving occupation specific skills rather than by inducing higher rates of occupational mobility or entrepreneurship.

Rapidly changing technologies and the growing openness of economies to international trade sometimes make entire occupations in the countries affected redundant. People employed in these occupations have to switch to other occupations that they do not necessarily like. Such “forced” occupational change causes stress, which can be harmful to their health. The effect of people losing their profession on their health has not been previously studied. This paper is intended to fill the gap. I study the effect of occupational change on health and health-related behavior using data from Russia’s economic transition, which was characterized by massive occupational mobility. The results show that “forced” occupational change has a significant negative effect on individual health; it also increases smoking and alcohol consumption. These results survive a number of robustness checks.

Although white children in the postbellum South benefited from the diversion of black school funds, both races had measures of schooling below the national norm. In particular, plantation states had the least commitment to public school systems. This paper theorizes that the tendency for education to create geographical and occupational mobility ran counter to the interests of southern landlords. It shows that agricultural production based on unskilled and highly supervised tenant farming was a major reason for the slow acceptance of universal free schooling in the plantation region of the United States.

A tenet of the professoriate is that becoming a retention case will increase one's salary. The results from this paper suggest that becoming a retention case does increase one's salary, but that on average, non-retention cases would obtain larger percentage salary gains from becoming retention cases than are achieved by those who are retention cases. Those who do not become retention cases are deterred on the supply side by the costs of doing so, particularly the costs related to potential resettlement. On the demand side, they are less likely to be raided by competing institutions because of their ages and the uncertainty of their future productivities.

This paper analyzes the effect of education on different types of occupational mobility. The focus of the analysis is on “career mobility”, an upward occupational mobility along a series of occupations that forms a worker's career. More educated workers are less likely, on average, to change occupation due to larger amounts of occupational specific investment and also because their careers involve a fewer number of distinct occupations. Within the same occupation of origin, however, more educated workers are more likely to move to a higher level occupation, within the firm (promotion) or across firms. In those occupations where the effect of schooling on wages is lower, schooling has a stronger effect on the likelihood of moving to a higher level occupation.

This paper studies the influence of education on labor and geographic mobility. Mobility is an important equilibrating factor in a changing economy. Therefore, any factor that induces mobility also alleviates the symptoms of disequilibrium, and any factor that inhibits mobility also impedes economic adjustments. Does the increasing level of education in modern industrial societies help or hurt economic transitions? In a PSID subsample consisting of 736 individuals, labor and geographic mobility from 1968 to 1982 were observed and related to the level of education in 1968 using the Poisson regression approach. It appears that labor and geographic mobility are governed by quite different behavioral mechanisms. Education strongly effects future labor and geographic mobility, but in opposite ways. A high level of education inhibits labor mobility, but increases geographic mobility.

This paper investigates occupational outcome of intermarried Whites and ethnic minorities in Britain. The chance of achieving upward occupational mobility is estimated with bivariate probit models controlling for demographic and human capital characteristics and taking into account the endogeneity of intermarriage. It is found that intermarried ethnic minorities; men and women alike acquire better occupational attainment than their single and coethnic married counterparts. Intermarried ethnic minority men and women are approximately 6% and 12% more likely to achieve upward occupational mobility respectively. The intermarriage premium is larger for the first generation than the second generation. Across all ethnic groups, Indian men and women receive the highest gain from an interethnic union.

Barriers to mobility are commonly believed to partition blue-collar jobs into skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled components. This paper develops a model based in large measure on the classical gravity model for purposes of ascertaining mobility pattern determinants and for testing for the presence and form of mobility barriers. The model is implemented on a 1965–1970 sample data of male mobility among 60 intermediate-detailed blue- collar occupations. The empirical results reveal that mobility patterns in the blue-collar component conform well with neoclassical theoretical expectations. Very little support is found for the view that the blue-collar labor market is highly structured or segmented in its operations through the mobility process.

This paper examines the theoretical and empirical basis for common rank-orderings of occupational roles by raters throughout the world. From an illustrative comparison of occupational stratification in Australia and the United States we conclude tentatively that (1) commonalities in the socioeconomic characteristics of occupational roles provide the basis for interplace consistencies in “prestige” scores, (2) the structure of occupational mobility in the U.S. and Australia is largely similar, (3) this similar structure of occupational stratification manifests a common socioeconomic process which defines a (the?) major component of occupational mobility in capitalist, industrial (only?) societies. We infer that “prestige” scores for occupations are fallible estimates of the socioeconomic statuses of occupation, within the context of mobility processes in (at least) the U.S. and Australia.