Most previous studies on intergenerational transmission of human capital are restricted to two generations - between the parent and the child generation. In this paper we investigate if there is an independent effect of the grandparent and the great grandparent generations in this process. We...

Equality of opportunity is an ethical goal with almost universal appeal. The interpretation taken here is that a society has achieved equality of opportunity if it is the case that what individuals accomplish, with respect to some desirable objective, is determined wholly by their choices and...

Family economic mobility has been a policy concern for decades, with interest heating up further since the 1990s. Using data that tracks individual families' incomes during overlapping 10-year periods from 1978 through 2014, this paper investigates the relationships of factors - family...

In this paper we show that there is a reduction in the correlation coefficient between father and children schooling levels over time in Italy. However, focusing on equality of circumstances, we show that there is still a persistent difference in the odds of attaining a college degree between...

Despite ample evidence on intergenerational persistence of formal education as well as on the determinants of non-formal training, these issues have not yet been analysed jointly. The question remains whether people from low-qualified family backgrounds make up for their relatively sparse own...

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has...

This paper investigates the influence of parental education on the returns to experience of Italian men using a new longitudinal dataset that contains detailed information on individual working histories. Our favourite panel estimates indicate that an additional year of parental education...

Understanding the formation of trust at the individual level is a key issue given the impact that it has been recognized to have on economic development. Theoretical work highlights the role of the transmission of values such as trust from parents to their children. Attempts to empirically...

We seek to quantify the role of education as a mechanism through which family background affects earnings. To this end, we propose a generalisation of statistical 'mediation analysis'. In our approach, the treatment and mediator can be multidimensional. This allows us to directly and flexibly...

In this paper we analyze the role played by self-confidence, modeled as beliefs about one's ability, in shaping task choices. We propose a model in which fully rational agents exploit all the available information to update their beliefs using Bayes' rule, eventually learning their true type. We...