Ricerc@Sapienza

This work analyses mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of inequality in Italy by exploiting the waves from 2000 to 2016 of the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and
Wealth. Using fathers’ education as a proxy of parental background, we show that 1-year increase in fathers’ education is associated with a 3.6% increase in children’s earnings. Contrary to the
widespread idea that the intergenerational transmission is only related to parents’ investment in their children’s education, large background-related advantages (+1.8% for each year of parental

This chapter is organized as follows: in the second section I list the possible channels that determine the association between parental characteristics and children’s outcomes, while in the third section I present my conceptual framework where indirect and direct mechanisms – i.e. mediated or not by human capital accumulation – are explicitly distinguished. Therefore, in the fourth section I briefly discuss the measurement issues of intergenerational inequality in economic studies.

Using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information on working histories of
Italian men,we investigate the relationship between parental background and sons’earnings
profiles.We find that the parental influence on sons’ earnings persists over the career and
that the direct influence controlling for sons’ education is large and grows during the
working career. After twenty years of experience, our baseline specification indicates that
an additional year of parental education is associated with a 2.0% increase in sons’wages,

Using an innovative dataset built by merging survey and administrative data, we provide new estimates of intergenerational earnings’ inequality between fathers and sons in Italy, extending previous evidence

Using a longitudinal dataset built merging administrative and survey data, we contribute to the literature on intergenerational inequality providing the first estimate of the intergenerational earnings elasticity (IGE) in Italy based on actual father–son pairs, taking into account issues related to measurement biases and comparing the size of the lifecycle bias when sons are selected by age or by potential experience (i.e. the number of years since the end of their studies). Our findings confirm that Italy is a low-mobility country.

The literature on intergenerational inequality has not inquired so far the role that market competition can play in the intergenerational transmission process. In this article we assess this role from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective. From the empirical side, using a panel dataset on Italian workers, we find that the parental background wage premium significantly decreases when sector competition increases.