Parental Socioeconomic Status and Later-Life Earnings: the Role of the Work-Family Life Course

Joanne Sophie Muller , Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)
Nicole Hiekel , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Aart C. Liefbroer , Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)

Most studies on intergenerational socioeconomic status (SES) mobility focus on fathers and sons, on early adult outcomes, and on the mediating role of educational attainment. However, the rise in women’s labour force participation, and the variation in and interrelatedness of work and family life courses, gives urgency to including maternal resources, the family life course and family policies in our analytical models of intergenerational socioeconomic status mobility. The present study will therefore address four questions. First, what is the association between parental SES and later-life personal earnings? Second, to what extent do work and family trajectories mediate the intergenerational transmission of SES? Third, how does the relation between the work and family trajectories depend on socioeconomic origin? Fourth, to what extent do these processes differ across countries? Using data on 19 countries in Europe from the GGP, Share and BHPS, we create typologies of the family and work life courses. Subsequently, we use these typologies in regression models to assess whether they mediate the association between parental SES and later-life personal earnings. Last, we study the association between the family and work life course, and its dependence on gender and class across welfare state contexts. This study is innovative, because it focuses on later-life outcomes and considers the entire life course, because it assesses the role of the family life course in intergenerational SES mobility, and because it addresses the linkages between work and family trajectories.

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 Presented in Session 24. Consequences of childhood family for adult life courses