OCCUPATIONAL-MOBILITY IN THE YEAR 2000 - PROJECTIONS FOR AMERICAN MEN AND WOMEN

We construct intergenerational occupational mobility tables for men and women aged 25-64 in the year 2000. The procedure for creating such tables involves three steps: (1) deriving origin distributions in the absence of actual survey data on occupational background; (2) constructing destination distributions using occupational forecasts prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics; (3) calculating cell counts by adjusting the most recent mobility tables available to the derived origin and destination distributions using the Deming-Stephan technique. The empirical accuracy of some aspects of our projection method is also assessed. We calculate several descriptive statistics on the basis of our predicted mobility matrix and examine mobility trends by comparing these statistics to those based on tables from earlier periods. Our results show an increasing tendency toward immobility and downward mobility, especially for men.