Childhood conditions, education and main job (Abstracts proceeding, page 101)

Objectives This paper aims at evaluating and comparing across many European countries the influence of earlylife circumstances (like childhood disparities and educational attainments) on the main job of individual working career. This work gets into that part of the scientific literature which investigates intergenerational mobility (indeed, social mobility research has for a long time focused on the relationship between social origins, education and occupational destinations). The main objective of this study is to identify potential direct and indirect (through educational attainment) effects of early life circumstances on the quality of the main job in the working career. Method/Models Using life-history data from the SHARELIFE survey, country-specific structural relationships among childhood socio-economic status (at the age of 10: number of rooms per capita where respondent lived, availability of books in the respondent's accommodation, type of occupation of household's main breadwinner), educational attainments (number of years in full time education) and main job characteristics (incomes at the beginning and the end of the job spell, duration of the job spell) are investigated through the estimation of recursive models, controlling for several individual covariates and cohort effects. Results and Conclusions Poorer socio-economic conditions during childhood are associated with higher differentials in years of full-time education and higher income inequalities. Preliminary results confirm a strong direct effect of early-life circumstances on educational attainment in all countries and an indirect effect on the main job characteristics. The extent of these results however varies across countries, as well as the presence of cohort effects. Findings suggest that education policies may play a role in explaining the observed differences across countries. The introduction of support systems fostering access to education of students from disadvantaged households can weaken their financial dependence from parents and loosen the persistence in socio-economic conditions across generations.