Abstract: We use administrative data linked to parish records from Northern Sweden to study how persistent inequality is across multiple generations in education, occupation, and wealth, going from historical to contemporary time. Our data cover seven generations and allows us to follow ancestors of individuals living in Sweden around the new millennium back more than 200 years, covering the mid-18th century to the 21st century. In our sample of around 75,000 traceable descendants, we analyze (a) up to 5th cousin correlations and (b) dynastic correlations over seven generations based on aggregations of ancestors’ social class/status. With both approaches, we find that past generations structure life chances many generations later, even though mobility is very high. The persistence we find using cousin and dynastic correlations is much higher compared to a simple Markov model limited to sequential parent–child transfers, but we also find that direct ancestor associations are very small. This suggests that there is a weak but constant kinship influence that attenuates slowly over generations. Importantly, cousin correlations are much stronger if the ancestor held a high class position, suggesting that closure is more accentuated in top of society.
The meeting will be held as a physical seminar in the Institute of Biology seminar room (V10-412-2) and will also be open to participate online via Zoom.