Suchergebnisse

AbstractResearch on the influence of family background on college graduates' earnings has not considered the importance of the match between parents' and children's field of study. Using a novel design based on within‐family comparisons, I examine long‐term earnings returns to reproducing parents' field of study in Denmark. I find that individuals whose field of study matches that of a parent have earnings that are 2 percent higher than those of their siblings with college degrees in different fields, on average. Earnings returns to field inheritance are highest in the fields of law (9 percent), medicine (6 percent), and engineering (4 percent) and are driven mainly by income from self‐employment. I find no direct evidence of nepotism as the earnings advantage does not arise from inheritance of parents' firms or employment in parents' occupational network. My findings indicate that, although a college degree generally equalizes family background differences in economic outcomes, there are additional payoffs to field inheritance, particularly in traditional fields characterized by a high degree of social closure and self‐employment.

Abstract
We study the overlap in the overall impact of family background on two widely studied labour market outcomes by considering whether brother similarities in occupational status are rooted in the same underlying family characteristics that affect brother similarities in income. We extend previous research using sibling correlations as an omnibus measure of total family background impact on a given outcome by directly quantifying how brother correlations in occupational status and income overlap. We apply a novel variance components model to data from Denmark and the United States, two countries known to follow a contradictory pattern: While income mobility is much lower in the United States, occupational mobility is virtually similar. Apart from confirming this pattern, we find a substantial overlap, around 70 per cent, in brother similarities in income and occupational status in both countries. Conventional family background variables account for less than one-fifth of this overlap in each country, suggesting that shared family origins of attainment in these two domains are constituted by largely unknown family characteristics. We speculate what these characteristics might be.

Although most studies of the transition from school to work take a snapshot perspective in examining economic returns to education, such returns evolve over an individual's lifetime. We empirically test a theoretical formulation derived from the cumulative advantage mechanism about enduring life-cycle effects of educational mobility on income. We analyse income trajectories for all Danes born in 1960–1961, and we consider how the welfare state may counteract certain mechanisms of intergenerational transmission that give children with college-educated parents better opportunities in the labour market. We find only small direct effects of parental college attainment on earnings trajectories after we control for offspring college attainment. Thus, schooling acts as a powerful and enduring economic leveller of family background effects in Denmark. Our analyses also show direct effects on trajectories in property income derived from wealth, suggesting that the welfare state has a harder time equalising income from wealth than from earnings.