He's a chip off the old block - The persistency of occupational choices among generations

Publication Type

Working paper

Authors

Knoll, Bodo; Riedel, Nadine; Schlenker, Eva

Year of publication

2013

Published in

SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research

Band/Volume

561-2013/

The purpose of this paper is to assess if parents exert an influence on the occupation
choices of their children. Using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), we
find a high persistency of occupational decisions across fathers and children using nested
and conditional logit models. To separate effects related to genetic factors (nature) and
parental education or role models (nurture), we determine the persistency separately
for children who grew up with their biological fathers and for those who did not. Our
results suggest that especially nurture plays a decisive role in explaining the choice of
one's occupation.