Industrialization and social mobility within a city: evidence from interwar Turin

This article asks whether industrialization raises intergenerational mobility within cities. I study Turin, a major Italian industrial hub, using repeated 5 per cent samples of the 1911, 1921, and 1936 population censuses digitized from household family sheets. I construct occupation-based earnings scores and measure relative mobility with the Information Content of Surnames (ICS). Citywide ICS falls by about one-half, and upward mobility from the bottom rises. These gains are sharply concentrated among residents of the industrial belt, where mechanical and metallurgical jobs expand. Area-level ICS measures surname–occupation sorting among current residents rather than childhood exposure to neighborhoods; the evidence indicates that industrialization operated through both local occupational upgrading and within-city reallocation toward the expanding industrial belt.