The intergenerational correlation of employment in Europe: a cross-country analysis

ABSTRACT

We analyse the long-run intergenerational correlation of employment in Europe, providing cross-country evidence. Using the 2011 special module on Intergenerational Transmission, from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we analyse the correlation between the current employment status of respondents, and that of their parents when respondents were 14 years old, in nine European countries. Estimates show that the intergenerational correlation of employment varies across countries and by gender, and is, in most cases, small or non-statistically significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergenerational transmission
• employment
• EU-SILC data

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J62
• E24

Acknowledgments

This paper has benefitted from funding from the Government of Aragón (Project S32-17R, co-financed by FEDER 2014-2020) and from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Project PID2019-108348RA-I00). J. Velilla gratefully acknowledges funding from the Government of Aragón Doctoral Grants (Program FSE Aragón 2014-2020) and from the Cátedra Emprender.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

¹ The sample of individuals for whom there is only information for the father or the mother is small; these results are available upon request.

² It is important to control for household finances, both at the current date and at the date of the special module (see, e.g. Borisov and Pissarides, 2020).

³ We have alternatively estimated logistic regression models, with the main results remaining qualitatively unchanged (see Table A2 in the Appendix).

⁴ We have estimated potential multicollinearity. According to variance inflation factors, estimates do not suffer from this issue.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Gobierno de Aragón [Program FSE Aragón 2014-2020,S32_20R], by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [PID2019-108348RA-I00], and by the Cátedra Emprender.