Family influence on early career outcomes in seven European countries

This paper studies how much family characteristics affect early career outcomes (earnings) of children in seven European countries: Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Austria using ECHP. To asses the overall importance of family influence an indicator of family effect on earnings, the siblings’ earnings correlations is computed, using the eight waves of ECHP data on siblings. Portugal is the country with the highest siblings’ correlation in earnings followed by Italy, Greece, Spain and France. Germany and Austria turned out to have a very low siblings’ correlation in earnings. The correlation increases when the same gender siblings samples are used in almost all countries. These findings may suggest that the earnings correlation of siblings of different gender is lower because of labor market discrimination against female.