Franziska Disslbacher was awarded a grant for her project "MOBILITY-PATH: Multidimensional Intergenerational Mobility and Pathways to Upward Mobility in Austria" from the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). The research team based at WU and CEU Vienna will provide comprehensive evidence on intergenerational social mobility in Austria and, in particular, its underlying drivers.

First, MOBILTY-PATH gathers data to provide novel evidence on the extent of and heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility across multiple dimensions. Second, it gains insights into the mechanisms underlying ISM by tracing children’s life-cycle outcomes by parental background. MOBILITY-PATH aims to shed light on the extent to which the luck of being born into a specific family is mitigated or aggravated by early-childhood factors such as neighborhoods and schooling, whether broad-access vocational training schemes and labor market conditions can lead to intergenerational (upward) mobility later in life, and what role tertiary education institutions such as the Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) can play in facilitating mobility.

MOBILITY-PATH can answer these questions by exploiting a novel combination of various individual-level administrative and register datasets. Furthermore, MOBILITY-PATH uncovers causal mechanisms behind intergenerational social mobility by working with research designs tailored to Austria’s institutional landscape. To facilitate engagement with stakeholders, including relevant policy-makers and the research community, the team will develop an interactive webpage on intergenerational social mobility and host a podcast.