From the cradle to the grave. The influence of family background on the career path of Italian men
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,
while an additional year of son’s education is associated with a 4.8% increase. We use
educational mobility between parents and sons to disentangle this influence into a glass
ceiling effect – a premium for well-off children who have high educational attainments –
and a parachute effect – a premium for well-off children who acquire less education than
their parents. We find that both effects contribute to explain the steeper earnings profiles
of the well-off sons, consistently with the idea that family ties play a crucial allocative role
in the Italian labour market.