Parental education and family characteristics: educational opportunities across cohorts in Italy and Spain

Drawing on data contained in the 2005 EU-SILC, this paper investigates the disparities in educational opportunities in Italy and Spain. Its main objective is to analyse the predicted probabilities of successfully completing upper-secondary and tertiary education for individuals with different parental backgrounds, and the changes in these probabilities across birth cohorts extending from 1940 to 1980. The results suggest that the disparities in tertiary education opportunities in Italy tend to increase over time. By contrast, the gap in educational opportunity in Spain shows a marked decrease across the cohorts. Moreover, by using an intuitive decomposition strategy, the paper shows that a large part of the educational gap between individuals of different backgrounds is “composed” of the difference in the endowment of family characteristics. Specifically, it seems that more highly educated parents are more able to endow their children with a better composition of family characteristics, which accounts for a significant proportion of the disparities in educational opportunity.

The long term effects of legalizing divorce on children

We estimate the effect of divorce legalization on the long-term well-being ofchildren. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting the different timing of divorcelegalization across European countries. Using European Community Household Paneldata, we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts who were raised in an environmentwhere divorce was banned with cohorts raised after divorce was legalized in the samecountry. We also have control countries where all cohorts were exposed (or notexposed) to divorce as children, thus leading to a difference-in-differences approach. Wefind that women who grew up under legal divorce have lower earnings and income aswell as worse health as adults compared with women who grew up under illegal divorce.These effects are not found for men. We find no effects of divorce legalization onchildren s family formation or dissolution patterns.

Girls like pink: explaining sex-typed occupational aspirations amongst young children

There is a high degree of sex-typing in young children's occupational aspirations and this has consequences for subsequent occupational segregation. Sociologists typically attribute early sex-differences in occupational preferences to gender socialization. Yet we still know surprisingly little about the mechanisms involved in the intergenerational transmission of sex-typical preferences and there is considerable theoretical controversy regarding the role of individual agency in the process of preference formation. This study analyzes the determinants of sex-typed occupational aspirations amongst British children aged between 11 and 15. We specify different mechanisms involved in the transmission of sex-typical preferences and propose an innovative definition of individual agency that is anchored in observable psychological traits linked to self-direction. This allows us to perform a simultaneous test of socialization and agency predictors of occupational sex-typing. We find that parental influences on occupational preferences operate mainly through three distinctive channels: 1) the effect that parental socio-economic resources have on the scope of children's occupational aspirations, 2) children's direct imitation of parental occupations, and 3) children's learning of sex-typed roles via the observation of parental behavior. We also find a strong net effect of children's own psychological predispositions -self-esteem in particular- on the incidence of sex-typical occupational preferences. Yet large differences in the occupational aspirations of girls and boys remain unexplained.