Dear colleagues,

 

We hereby invite you to join our next Economics of Inequality Research Seminar at WU Vienna.

 

Jean-William Laliberté (University of Calgary) will present the paper

 

Social Connections and the Persistence of Income Across Generations.

 

Date and Time: Monday, April 7; 3.00 p.m.

Location:  WU Vienna, D3 - D3.0.222.

 

Abstract 

Are children of high-income families more likely to work at better-paying firms, and if so, why? This paper examines the role of one key potential explanation: differences in social networks. To do so, we use Canadian administrative data to construct an employee-employer-parent-child matched dataset, which we link to detailed educational records. We first show that, in an accounting sense, access to high-paying employers explains roughly half of the transmission of income across generations, as measured by the income rank-rank relationship. We then leverage rich education data to identify the impact of social connections on the probability of working at a given firm by comparing people who have the exact same degree but not the same connections. We find parental connections alone explain 10% of the firm-sorting component of intergenerational income rank-rank relationship. Finally, firm performance declines when parent business owners hire their own children, suggesting these children receive preferential treatment.

 

Please register your participation here

 

Best regards,

 

Franziska Disslbacher

 


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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

 

CenTax Center for the Analysis of Taxation – University Warwick |

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

franziskadisslbacher.com