Abstract

This paper examines how the intergenerational transmission of worklessness varies according to the gender of parents, and the gender of their children, across different groups of European countries. In particular, it aims at disentangling the relative role of mothers and fathers in influencing the risk of not being successfully employed for their sons and daughters (in the early stage of their working life), and at assessing the extent to which these effects are mediated by education and other individual characteristics. To this end, we use a sample of men and women aged 25-34 from the EU-SILC cross-sectional data (2011), and information about the working condition of their parents when young adults were aged about 14. We show that fathers and mothers play different roles in different country groups. Fathers’ effect is generally mediated by education and other individual characteristics (with only few exceptions), whereas mothers play a role also after controlling for individual characteristics, particularly for their daughters. Our results call for new policy initiatives to improve labour market efficiency and to reduce the inequalities linked to paternal (and maternal) employment in Mediterranean (and CEE) countries.