Workless parents, workess children?

Experiencing parental worklessness during adolescence may impact on young adults’ aspirations and attitudes towards the labour market (different evaluations of work and sense of stigma, different attitudes towards relying on welfare benefits), as well as the type of social networks on which they can rely when searching for a job. But we know little about the extent to which these effects vary across European countries, and even less about the relative role of fathers and mothers. In this work, we analyse the extent to which parents’ worklessness during children’s adolescence (around 14 years of age) affects their children’s employment outcomes as young adults (around 30 years of age) across various European country groups, and considering the gender of both parents and children. We used a European-harmonised household survey (EU-SILC), which contains information about the employment condition of young adults (aged 25-34) in 2005 and 2011 and about the working condition of their parents when these young adults were aged about 14. We estimate the impact of various individual, family and country characteristics on young adults’ likelihood of being employed, NEET or in education for five groups of countries: Nordic, Continental, English-speaking, Mediterranean and Eastern European countries.