When family beats welfare. Background effects in EU15 country clusters

Following the literature that shows substantial cross-country differences in the degree of intergenerational mobility, we compare the intergenerational transmission of earnings advantages in EU15 Country Clusters countries using the EU-SILC dataset. Considering parental occupation as main background variable, we assess whether offspring’s educational attainments are associated to parental background and whether a residual correlation between parental background and offspring’s labour incomes persists after controlling for intervening background-related factors (child education and occupation). Education is everywhere strongly associated to family characteristics, whereas, as regards as labour incomes, residual background correlations are not significant in Nordic and Continental countries while they appear large in Anglo-Saxon and Southern countries.