Research project on "Patrimonial tendencies and social exclusion: how do sticky floors and sticky ceilings hinder social mobility?"

The research contributes to explaining the notoriously low level of intergenerational mobility in Hungary. Although parental circumstances played a smaller role at the time of the regime change, the last two decades have witnessed a reversal. Among the barriers to mobility, we can primarily identify the selectivity of the education system and the insufficiently inclusive nature of education policy. The educational homogamy spreading in marriage patterns could have represented an additional limitation to mobility. Parental property transfer has not yet played a decisive role so far, but property transfer is expected to play a larger role in determining the chances of success (among other things due to the extremely heterogeneous revaluation in the owner-occupied housing sector). The question is what mechanisms of asset transfer will be typical in the near future. The research also pointed to serious deficiencies in the data infrastructure required for mobility research. Databases capable of mapping longer-term trends can only be compared with major compromises, while key datasets either do not contain data on the parents' situation or have serious problems with data quality. The biggest of such deficiencies were found in the case of the EU-SILC, whose data, due to the problems of the income variable, were in several cases unsuitable for drawing reliable social scientific conclusions from them.

The research project, funded by OTKA (K_135934) resulted in two reviews, eight book chapters, one manuscript, nine conference presentations, and three journal articles under way to be published in the near future. István György Tóth and Ábel Csathó examined how the impact of childhood circumstances on the financial situation varies in a European comparison using EU-Silc data. Borbála Lőrincz and Emese Antal-Fekete analyzed the effect of the education system, Márton Medgyesi of wealth transfers, while Vera Horváth examined a specific case of the latter: the impact of property transfers on mobility. Dávid Erát, Katalin Füzér, and Ákos Huszár examined the evolution of partner selection patterns, while Ákos Huszár also analyzed the role of class structure in income distribution. All published papers are available on Tarki - TopAp.