Dear colleagues,
We hereby invite you to join our next Economics
of Inequality Research Seminar at WU Vienna.
Michael Lovenheim (Cornell University)
will present the paper
Dynastic Capital and the Inheritance of Social Advantage.
Co-Authors: Eppie van Egeraat and Alexander Willen
Date and Time:
Monday, June 1; 3.00 p.m.
Location: WU Vienna,
D4.0.127.
Abstract
We use population-wide Norwegian administrative data to construct a multidimensional measure of dynastic social capital—elite education, occupational prestige, organizational and corporate
leadership, and residence in high-price neighborhoods—and examine how it is transmitted across generations. Social capital is strongly persistent across generations and strongly predicts children’s long-run earnings and access to elite positions, even after
conditioning on parental income, education, and cognitive ability. Incorporating social capital into standard mobility regressions reduces estimated income-based persistence by more than half, indicating that a substantial share of intergenerational inequality
reflects inherited social positions rather than financial resources alone. The influence of social capital grows over the life cycle and has a particularly large effect on becoming a top earner. Quasi-experimental evidence from adoption placements and parental
lottery wins shows that these patterns reflect environmental transmission rather than genetic inheritance or direct income effects. Together, the findings reframe intergenerational mobility as a process shaped not only by inherited resources and skills, but
also by durable social positions transmitted across generations.
Please register your participation
here.
Best regards,
Franziska Disslbacher
----
Franziska Disslbacher, PhD
Assistant Professor
Institute for Spatial & Social-Ecological Transformations
&
Research Institute Economics of Inequality
WU, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria
LSE International Inequalities Institute – Research Fellow |
Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality CUNY |
SOEP / DIW – Associated Researcher
World Inequality Lab PSE– Research Fellow
+43 1 313 36 6669
franziska.disslbacher@wu.ac.at