Childhood gap, Parenting Styles and Life Time Inequality

Over the last couple of decades, most countries have experienced increased social inequalities along many dimensions, including education, employment, income, physical and mental health. These changes are all critical for the well-being of individuals and their families. Recently the literature has focused on the intergenerational aspects of inequality. I will focus on the recent papers we have worked on regarding this topic recently within this project. The first project Intergenerational Transmission, Human Capital Formation and the Timing of Parental Income (Joint with Pedro Carneiro, Emma Tominey, Italo Lopez-Garcia), Journal of Political Economy (2021), focus on the role on intergenerational mobility in permanent income, and show that also temporary income shocks in pre-school age can have an additional effect on strengthening the long-term links in permanent income. The second paper Breaking the Links: Natural Resource Booms and Intergenerational Mobility (Joint with Aline Butikofer and Antonio Dalla-Zuanna), forthcoming in Review of Economics and Statistics, shows that changes in the industrial composition by the expansion of new industries with demand for new types of skills and were old networks and skills are less attractive, can actually to some degree break the links between children?s and parent?s positions in the income distributions. The third paper, What are the Drivers Intergenerational Mobility? The Role of Family, Neighborhood, Education and Social Class, is an overview article and will be printed in the Journal of Economic Literature, and focus on the role of investment in human capital as a major policy to reduce intergenerational persistence in permanent income. I will also mentioned that the paper focused on in last year?s report Mothers Working during Preschool Years and Child Skills. Does Income Compensate? (Nicoletti, Salvanes, Tominey, CEPR DP No14749), has been printed in the leading journal in labor economics The Journal of Labor Economics, April 2023Volume 41, Number 2pp. 389 – 429. In a brand new paper, "First generation elite: the role of social networks" we analyze intergenerational mobiliity with a focus on recrutiment to elite studies in Norway and the role of social networks for applying to these studies for teenagers from low socio-economic background. We find strong effects of social networks in high school that can explain the low degree of social mobility to these studies. The paper is joint with Emma Tomeney, University of York, og Sara Cattan fra IFS/UCL in London. The paper is under revison for American Economic Review.

In the past decades, most Western countries have experienced an important social phenomenon in that economic and social inequalities have risen sharply along many dimensions, including education, employment, income, physical and mental health. Changes in income inequality have been associated with disparities in other dimensions of life, including education, health and family structure, all critical for the well-being of individuals and their families. Coinciding with the increase in social inequality, many societies have experienced that the behavioral problems, educational and labor market outcomes have been widening more for men than for women. An important and growing literature across many fields, has documented that the socioeconomic gradient shows up early in life and the gap continues to grow into adulthood, and that the gap persists across generations . For instance, recent research finds that at least 50 percent of the life-time earnings across workers results from characteristics and attributes at the age of 18. However, there is still a lack of scientific evidence of the causal mechanisms driving these patterns. For instance, how much of the socioeconomic gradient reflects differences in parents, investments in the human capital of their children, how much reflects transmission of preferences and beliefs? Answers to these questions are of great importance for how we design effective policies to target fundamental inequalities in a society. Based on the insights from the modern dynamic skill formation theory, this project aims to address these research challenges by making use of a set of innovative methodological approaches to study inequality by uniquely combining census wide population register data with different types of experiments including lab experiments, randomized control trials, and natural policy experiments.