Parental Income in the Labor Market by Jean-William Laliberté

Join us for the latest Applied Economics Research Seminar Series event, Autumn Term 2024.

Join Jean-William Laliberté, from the Department of Economics at the University of Calgary, will present this week's seminar on Parental Income in the Labor Market.

Abstract

Are children of high-income families more likely to work at better-paying firms, and if so, why? To answer these questions, we use Canadian administrative data to construct an employee-employer-parent-child matched dataset, which we link to detailed educational records. We use these data to quantify the role of observable human capital (education) and social connections for firm sorting. We find that, in an accounting sense, access to high-paying employers explains roughly half of the transmission of income across generations, as measured by the income rank-rank relationship. Probing mechanisms contributing to the sorting of high-income children to high-paying employers, we find the explanatory power of education largely exceeds that of social connections. We further provide suggestive evidence that some children of high-income families receive preferential treatment when they work at firms their parents own, but the quantitative importance of this phenomenon for overall intergenerational income mobility remains limited.

The seminar will begin with a presentation and will end with a Q and A session.

It will be held in the Economics Common Room at 2pm on Thursday 31 October. This event is open to all levels of study and is also open to the public. To register your place and gain access to the webinar, please contact the seminar organisers.

This event is part of the Applied Economics Research Seminar Series.