The Intergenerational Transmission of Employers in Norway

To the extent that children’s adult economic success arise from advantaged parents’ active strategies to help their children gain access to good jobs in adulthood, beyond the legitimate transmission of skills, preference socialization, and human-capital investments, this may reflect inequality of opportunities. Using economy-wide longitudinal data from administrative registries, this paper will explore the intergenerational transmission of employers in Norway. I will follow several birth cohorts (N ~ 60,000 per cohort) from late adolescence into adulthood (mid-30s) with matched employer-employee information in both the parental and the filial generation. Based on results from prior studies, I expect to find that a relatively high share (30-40%) of young adult workers will have been employed for a firm that also employed one of their parents. This relationship has been shown to be strongly related to the first proper job the child obtains, while for a smaller share (<10%) of individuals this also applies to their primary job as adults. I will explore how this pattern varies over the parental earnings distribution, with firm-specific characteristics, and according to detailed information on children’s educational credentials. The extent to which persistence in a high earnings’ status is linked to children inheriting an employer from their father (or mother) will be a key focus of the empirical investigation. Expected results may shed light on organizational features of the labor market and the role of parental resources—through information, networks, and direct control of the hiring process—in facilitating the economic success of their children in an egalitarian Nordic welfare state context.