Aggregate implications of occupational inheritance in China and India

This paper documents occupational inheritance – that is, children’s inheritance of their parents’ occupations – in China, India, and other countries. Among the causes of the prevalence of occupational inheritance, we target two broad categories that impede growth: labor market frictions and barriers to human capital acquisition. Counterfactual experiments based on a tractable occupational choice model suggest that if the impediments mentioned above were reduced to the US levels, labor productivity would grow by 60–75% in China and 107–178% in India. China realized 74–89% of this growth potential from the 1980s to 2009. In addition, this productivity gain is accompanied by a decrease in the correlation of intergenerational incomes.

Multigenerational families in nineteenth-century America

Revisionist historians maintain that the aged in nineteenth-century America and north-western Europe usually preferred to reside alone or with only their spouse. According to this interpretation, the aged ordinarily resided with their adult children only out of necessity, especially in cases of poverty or infirmity. This article challenges that position, arguing that in mid-nineteenth-century America coresidence of the aged with their children was almost universal, and that the poor and sick aged were the group most likely to live alone. The article suggests that the decline of the multigenerational family in the twentieth century is connected to the rise of wage labour and the diminishing importance of agricultural and occupational inheritance.

Occupational Inheritance: The Role of Cultural Capital and Gender

It is known that occupational destination is influenced by family cultural resources. Most research on the effects of cultural capital, using nationally representative datasets, has concentrated on paternal occupation and education, finding that higher levels of paternal education are associated with greater educational and occupational attainment. As a result cultural capital has been put forward as a partial explanation for intergenerational class stability. It has been argued that occupational inheritance is more marked for the professional than for the managerial sector of the middle class, due to their greater cultural capital (Savage et al. 1992). This paper explores the effects of father's labour market sector (i.e. managerial or professional) and the educational attainment of both parents, using the National Child Development Study. Evidence was found: 1) that the children of professional fathers are more successful educationally than the children of managers, taking into account measured ability at age 11; and 2) that professional family origins facilitate entry into professional occupations, independently of educational attainments. The effect of gender was also explored. The relative lack of educational attainment on the part of children of managers had a more negative effect on the careers of daughters than of sons.