Beyond human capital: how does parents’ direct influence on their sons’ earnings vary across eight OECD countries?

Exploring the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) database, we analyse close to 7000 sons aged 30-54 in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland, the UK and the US around 2011-2012. We investigate to what degree the association between parental background (educational attainment and the number of books in the parental home) and sons’ earnings is mediated by four different dimensions of sons’ human capital: educational attainment, field of study, numeracy and literacy scores, and proxies of non-cognitive skills. We find that the intergenerational transmission process is wholly mediated by sons’ formal education only in the US. By contrast, a significant residual association remains even after we control for all four dimensions of sons’ human capital in Italy, Spain, Poland (for both parental background proxies) and France and the UK (just for parental education). While we cannot exclude that this residual association is due to further unobservable background-related skills sons might have, this points to family factors unrelated to human capital-based meritocracy that might play a particularly important role in the intergenerational transmission of labour market advantage in these five societies.