The Intergenerational Correlation of Employment: Is There a Role for Work Culture?

Gabriela Galassi, David Koll and Lukas Mayr

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: We document a substantial positive correlation of employment status between mothers and their children in the United States, linking data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults. After controlling for ability, education and wealth, a one-year increase in a mother’s employment is associated with six weeks more employment of her child on average. The intergenerational transmission of maternal employment is stronger to daughters than to sons, and it is higher for low-educated and low-income mothers. Potential mechanisms we were able to rule out included networks, occupation-specific human capital and conditions within the local labor market. By contrast, we provide suggestive evidence for a role-model channel through which labor force participation is transmitted.

Keywords: Econometric and statistical methods; Economic models; Labour markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J21 J22 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-mac and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/swp2019-33.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocawp:19-33

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().