Abstract

This article deals with the transmission of economic inequality from one generation to the next. Section 2 presents a theoretical discussion of the mechanisms that may explain the associations between income and family background. Section 3 discusses the income concepts used in this research. Section 4 explains the measures used to describe family associations in income while Section 5 offers a cross-national overview of recent estimates of family associations. Section 6 presents evidence on whether parental income has a causal impact on offspring. In Section 7 we report results from a variety of approaches to uncover what underlies associations between income and family background. Section 8 concludes and offers some advice for future research.