La mobilité économique est une des aspirations de toute société moderne, mais comment peut-on savoir la véritable évolution de la mobilité sociale ? C’est-à-dire : 1) peut-on mesurer la mobilité sociale avec les données ou la technologie disponibles aujourd’hui? 2) Quelles sont les tendances de la mobilité sociale qui a traversées la génération actuelle? Ou encore 3) à quel point la société actuelle est-elle mobile par rapport aux anciennes générations? Ce sont les trois questions à la base de cette thèse. Nous soutenons ici que c’est possible de connaître encore plus sur l’évolution de la mobilité sociale en restreignant son analyse à quelques dimensions dans le champ de l’économie : le revenu et l’éducation. Le première article s’attaque au problème du manque des données nécessaires pour l’analyse des dynamiques du revenu à l’intérieur d’une génération. Il est avéré que les données longitudinales sont rares et très peu disponibles dans la plupart des pays, ce qui est vrai même pour les pays développés ! Nous avons essayé d’assembler ce casse-tête par des approches méthodologiques récentes, telles que les «panels synthétiques», une méthodologie normalement utilisée pour l’analyse des dynamiques de la pauvreté. Les articles deux et trois décrivent, plus spécifiquement, les tendances à long terme de la mobilité économique pour le revenu et pour l’éducation, respectivement. Le deuxième papier s’occupe de la mobilité intra-générationnelle, tandis que le troisième est dédié à la mobilité intergénérationnelle. Tous les deux répondent aux questions deux et trois posées plus en haut, en cherchant d’améliorer la façon dont la dimension temporaire est incluse dans l’analyse du bien-être économique, ceci avec pour but de reproduire l’effet d’un film fait avec plusieurs clichés. Cette thèse cherche à élargir le savoir expérimental sur la mobilité économique, vu que la plupart des études ne prennent en compte que quelques années de mobilité intra-générationnelle ou à peine quelque génération. En outre, la plupart des résultats des expériences existantes font référence aux pays scandinaves ou à des pays fortement industrialisés. Pour cette thèse nous avons donc pris l’exemple du Mexique, mais les approches et les principes méthodologiques utilisés pourront être appliqués à n’importe quel autre pays. Les chemins de nos vies sont dans un mouvement perpétuel : par monts et par vaux. Dans une société démocratique, il semble utile de savoir si notre appartenance sociale nous permet de nous en sortir malgré nos origines, ou si au contraire, notre destin est voué à l’échec à cause d’elles. Il nous faut en effet, des résultats empiriques pour répondre à ces délibérations. Cette thèse est peut-être une invitation osée à mettre en marche cette conversation. / Economic mobility constitutes a social aspiration in many modern societies however do we really know the actual evolution of social mobility? In other words: 1) how can we measure economic mobility with the data available or with the technology at hand? 2) What are the trends of economic mobility experienced by the current generation? Moreover 3) how mobile is a society relative to previous generations? These questions motivate this dissertation. The complexity of these issues may derive in some sort of paralysis but it is claimed here that it may be possible to learn something about its evolution by restricting analysis to a couple of key dimensions within the economic discipline: income and education. This is the scope followed by this research. The first paper in this dissertation is devoted to deal with the lack of the required data to examine the income dynamics within one generation. It is well known that longitudinal data is often scarce and is seldom available in many countries. This is the case even in well-developed countries! This conundrum has been partially addressed through recent methodological approaches by the so-called synthetic panels. The second part of this dissertation is entirely devoted to applied research. More specifically, the second and third papers describe long run trends of economic mobility in income and education respectively. The former is devoted to intra-generational mobility while the later is devoted to inter-generational mobility. Each of them address the second and third interrogations referred above. In a way this dissertation attempts to improve the addition of the time dimension in the analysis of economic wellbeing. It attempts to produce the effect of a motion picture by the use multiple snapshots. The trends contained herein are far from being perfect and complete but they are based on the use of extensive data and multiple methods covering three decades and the same number of generations in each case. This research expects to expand our knowledge on the empirics of economic mobility as most of the studies refer to few years of intra-generational mobility or to a couple of generations only. Furthermore, most of the empirical evidence available refers to Nordic and highly industrialized countries. Mexico is the canvas of this work but the approaches and principles followed here could be easily mimicked elsewhere. The roads of our lives are constantly moving: rising and falling. In a democratic context, it is useful to know, whether our society provides the chance to get ahead regardless of our origins, or whether this chance is ruled or doomed by them. Empirical evidence is needed to foster these deliberations. This dissertation may well be an invitation to sustain this kind conversation.

Paying specific attention to influences of life events and different timing of taking compulsory military service for Taiwanese people, this dissertation explores time-dependence of job mobility and class mobility throughout careers. The author criticizes that previous research of social mobility focusing on either differences between father’s and son’s classes or the relationship between one’s initial and current statuses do not realize the process of status attainment in which individual characteristics and life courses continuously interact with external structures in the labor market. The analyses in this dissertation demonstrate the dynamics of career mobility by specifying two career stages and investigating the differences in paces and mechanisms of job change and class mobility. All findings lead to the conclusion that the time dependence of career mobility is deeply embedded in the context of life course in a society. For Taiwanese men, the timing of taking CMS (i.e., before or after their first entry into the labor force), which is strongly correlated with their educational level, is crucial to the pace and type of career development. For Taiwanese women, their trajectories of mobility follow the typical scenario of career mobility in which job change happens often during the early career and then settles into relatively stable employment in the later stage. Compared to job mobility, status attainment is more stable and consistent throughout the life time. After specifying the directions of job mobility, results show that upward and downward mobility, which bring significant change in occupational prestige, do not show gender differences in their transition rates, and their patterns are consistent throughout careers. With respect to the transition between social classes, moving into ownership (including employers and self-employed) in later careers is a mainstream transition for all Taiwanese people in spite the fact that women have much lower transition rates than do men. Moreover, this dissertation also examines inter-sector and intra-sector mobility in segmented labor market in Taiwan. Taking selection bias into consideration, this research found that under the assumption of homogeneity, the treatment effects of initial attainment in the public sector have negative effects on job mobility throughout careers. However, when heterogeneity of treatment effects are taken into account, findings reveal that there is no significant heterogeneity in this treatment effect for Taiwanese men, but for Taiwan women, the more likely they are to attain a position in the public sector at the time of first entry into the labor market, based on their educational achievement and social background, the more they benefit via low transition rates of job mobility in their work lives. / text