No. 2025-13 - Parents’ Education and Children’s Household Income Across Cohorts in Europe

Abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between parental education and the current household income decile position of working-age adults across eighteen European countries. Using the retrospective modules of EU-SILC from 2005, 2011, 2019 and 2023, we classify parental households as having high or low education and group respondents into birth cohorts. The share of highly educated parents is seen to have increased across cohorts, but the relative advantage in terms of offsprings’ position in the household income distribution associated with it did not follow a consistent trend. In contrast, most countries experienced a decline in the income position ’penalty’ associated with low parental education. Regression analyses suggest that for low parental education, the decline is more apparent within countries while for high parental education, cross-country variation dominates. These results underscore the asymmetric impact of advantage and disadvantage and highlight the need to explore factors shaping these dynamics both across and within countries.