Primarily using data from the 2010 European Social Survey, we analyze intergenerational educational persistence in 20 European countries, studying cross-country and cross-cluster differences in intergenerational mobility; the role of gender in determining educational persistence across generations; and changes in the degree of intergenerational persistence over time. We find that persistence is highest in the Southern and Eastern European countries, and lowest in the Nordic countries. While intergenerational persistence in the Nordic and Southern countries has declined over time, it has remained relatively steady in the rest of Europe. Further, we find evidence of differences in intergenerational persistence by gender, with mothers' education being a stronger determinant of daughters' (instead of sons') education and fathers' education a stronger determinant of the education of their sons. Finally we see that for most clusters differences over time are largely driven by increasing mobility for younger women. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

We employ 2011 European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data for Austria to perform Markovian mobility matrix analysis and uni- and multivariate econometric analysis to study intergenerational educational mobility by gender and migration background. We find that the educational attainment of girls and migrants relative to their parents is less mobile than for boys and natives. Further, the immobility of educational attainment is enhanced by the intersection of these identities: migrant girls are the least educationally mobile group and are especially likely to follow their mothers 19 educational footsteps, while native boys are the most mobile, especially compared to their mothers. / Series: WWWforEurope

We employ 2011 European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data for Austria to perform Markovian mobility matrix analysis and uni- and multivariate econometric analysis to study intergenerational educational mobility by gender and migration background. We find that the educational attainment of girls and migrants relative to their parents is less mobile than for boys and natives. Further, the immobility of educational attainment is enhanced by the intersection of these identities: migrant girls are the least educationally mobile group and are especially likely to follow their mothers 19 educational footsteps, while native boys are the most mobile, especially compared to their mothers. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Primarily using data from the 2010 European Social Survey, we analyze intergenerational educational persistence in 20 European countries, studying cross-country and cross-cluster differences; changes in the degree of intergenerational persistence over time; and the role of gender in determining educational persistence across generations. We find that persistence is highest in the Southern and Eastern European countries, and lowest in the Nordic countries. While persistence in the Nordic and Southern countries has declined over time, it has remained relatively steady in the rest of Europe. Our analysis highlights the importance of a detailed gender analysis in studying intergenerational persistence, finding that mothers education is a stronger determinant of daughters (instead of sons) education and fathers education a stronger determinant of the education of their sons. For most clusters, declines in intergenerational persistence over time are largely driven by increasing mobility for younger women.

This dissertation consists of three essays related to the effects of welfare reform on the intergenerational transmission of welfare participation as well as effects on labor supply and childcare arrangements. States implemented welfare reform at different times from 1992 to 1996, and these policies notably introduced work requirements and other restrictions intended to limit dependency of needy families. One mechanism reforms were intended to address was childhood exposure to a "culture" of ongoing welfare receipt. In Essay 1, I estimate the effect of reform on the transmission of welfare participation for 2961 mother-daughter pairs in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) over the period 1968-2013. I find that a mother's welfare participation increased her daughter's odds of participation as an adult by roughly 30 percentage points, but that welfare reform attenuated this transmission by at least 50 percent, or at least 30 percent over the baseline odds of participation. While I find comparable-sized transmission patterns in daughters' adult use of the broader safety net and other outcomes such as educational attainment and income, there is no diminution of transmission after welfare reform. In Essay 2, I estimate behavioral labor supply responses to reforms using experimental data from Connecticut's Jobs First welfare waiver program in 1996. Recent studies have used a distributional analysis of Jobs First suggesting evidence that some individuals reduce hours in order to opt into welfare, an example of behavioral-induced participation. However, estimates obtained by a semi-parametric panel quantile estimator allowing women to vary arbitrarily in preferences and welfare participation costs indicate no evidence of behavioral-induced participation. These findings show that a welfare program imposes an estimated cost up to 10 percent of quarterly earnings, and these costs can be heterogeneous throughout the conditional earnings distribution. Lastly, in Essay 3, I return to PSID data to examine the relationship between welfare spending on childcare assistance and the care arrangements chosen by low-income families. Experimental evidence has shown that formal child care can result in long-term socioeconomic gains for disadvantaged children, and work requirements after welfare reform have necessitated increased demand for child care among single mothers. I find that an increase of a thousand dollars in state-level childcare assistance per child in poverty increases the probability of formal care among low-earnings single-mother families by about 27 to 30 percentage points. When public assistance makes child care more affordable, families within the target population reveal a higher preference for formal care relative to informal, which may be related to perceived quality improvements for child enrichment and development.

Submitted by Murilo Esteves de Santi (murilo_es@hotmail.com) on 2016-07-12T17:47:22Z No. of bitstreams: 1 biblioteca.pdf: 575242 bytes, checksum: a061c3686ed763a0e9468ec7a8c130a0 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by GILSON ROCHA MIRANDA (gilson.miranda@fgv.br) on 2016-11-29T11:40:40Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 biblioteca.pdf: 575242 bytes, checksum: a061c3686ed763a0e9468ec7a8c130a0 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Maria Almeida (maria.socorro@fgv.br) on 2016-12-06T13:22:08Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 biblioteca.pdf: 575242 bytes, checksum: a061c3686ed763a0e9468ec7a8c130a0 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-06T13:23:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 biblioteca.pdf: 575242 bytes, checksum: a061c3686ed763a0e9468ec7a8c130a0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016 / I study the impact of the changes in the U.S. labor market that took place in the last few decades - such as the increase in the college wage premium and the reduction in the gender wage gap - on the intergenerational persistence of income, with a particular emphasis on the marriage market channel. To motivate my analysis, I document a positive cross-country correlation between intergenerational persistence of income (and education) and educational assortative mating. I then develop an overlapping generations model in which parents invest in their children's education and individuals choose whom they are going to marry, and estimate the model to fit the postwar U.S. data. My results suggest that both of these changes have affected the intergenerational earnings persistence, but that the marriage decision plays only a very small role in these results.