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Most intergenerational mobility studies use data on two generations to estimate the elasticity between son's and father's earnings. The purpose of this paper is to use a data set spanning three generations to estimate additional relationships between a person's earnings and family background yielded by intergenerational mobility models such as Becker-Tomes (1979) model and modified versions of it.

The paper uses data from the 1996 PNAD – a nationally representative household survey in Brazil. The author builds a data set consisting of 5,125 grandfather-father-son triplets by taking advantage of two characteristics of Brazil. First, commonly in Brazil, individuals live with their parents until they marry. Second, individuals tended to quit school and begin working at an early age. As a result, there are many households with adult sons who are not at the very beginning of their working careers. Since the sample is limited to households with adult sons, the author applies Heckman (1979) estimation procedure to address selection bias.

Estimation results contradict some predictions of simple versions of the Becker and Tomes model. The paper proposes a modified version of the Becker and Tomes model that allows for a skipping generation effect, and finds that family background explains 34.9 percent of the variation in earnings among males aged 16-27 in Brazil. If there were no differences in endowments (talent, IQ, health, physical appearance, attitudes toward work, family connections, etc.), the variation in earnings would fall by no less than 26 percent. If it were possible to eliminate differences in investment in human capital, the variation in earnings would fall by at most 21.1 percent.

The paper has two main data limitations. First, the 1996 earnings of the fathers and sons are used as proxies for lifetime earnings although the transitory component of one-year earnings may be quite large, particularly at young ages. Second, in spite of the efforts to deal with the sample selection bias, the paper shows that the intergenerational elasticity in earnings for the sons aged 22-27 is about 14.6 percent lower for the subsample of households with adult sons than for the full sample.

The paper finds evidence supporting the existence of a direct effect of the grandparents on the grandchildren beyond their influence on the parents, and reinforces consideration of this factor in intergenerational mobility studies.

The findings in this paper may suggest a room for improvements in economic outcomes of children in less privileged families through investment in formal education as well as policies that considers other aspects of a person's life. For instance, Bolsa Família – a Brazilian government program that provide cash allowances to poor families conditional on children school attendance – may improve the economic outcomes of poor children by enforcing formal education and by lessening the children hardships at home.

The paper proposes a modified version of the Becker and Tomes model which allows for a skipping generation effect. Under the assumptions of the modified model and in hand with a three-generations data set from Brazil, the paper estimates a lowerbound for the variation in earnings explained by differences in endowments across families, and an upperbound for the variation in earnings explained by differences in human capital.

This study aims to analyze to what extent distance education is feasible and efficient with the limited technological infrastructure in Egypt. The study answers this question from the perspective of households' preparedness level regarding possessing information and communication technologies (ICTs). In addition, it assesses whether the pattern of students' ICT ownership is influenced by disability- and socioeconomic-based inequality in education and whether the pattern of ICT ownership exacerbates such biases.

A three-stage probit model with double sample selection (PMDSS) was applied to estimate the factors likely to influence ICT possession, considering the selection process for school enrollment and education continuation. The authors utilized nationally representative data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey 2018.

About 40% of students aged 12–25 did not have ICTs. Most socioeconomically poor households, particularly those living in Upper Egypt, were the least likely to obtain ICTs and rely on distance education. In addition, female students, particularly those with disabilities, had the lowest chance of benefitting from distance learning.

The persistent structural deprivation of school enrollment and educational progression has led to the positive selection of well-off children in education, which is extended to ICT possession and internet use. Without addressing these structural biases, the study suggests that distance education will likely exacerbate educational inequalities.

The study analyzed the extent to which Egyptian families were prepared in 2018 regarding ICT possessions for distance education for their children, particularly those with disabilities. Furthermore, it investigated whether access to distance learning was influenced by disability- and socioeconomic-based inequalities in education.

A discipline is bound by some combination of a shared subject matter, shared theory, and shared technique. Yet modern economics is seemingly without limit to its domain. As a discipline without a shared subject matter, what is the binding force of economics today? The authors combine topic modeling and text analysis to analyze different approaches to inquiry within the discipline of economics. The authors find that the importance of theory has declined as economics has increasingly become defined by its empirical techniques. The authors question whether this trajectory is stable in the long run as the binding force of the discipline.

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).

These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.

Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.

Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.

One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.

There is a huge amount of information and data stored in publicly available online databases that consist of large text files accessed by Boolean search techniques. It is widely held that less use is made of these databases than could or should be the case, and that one reason for this is that potential users find it difficult to identify which databases to search, to use the various command languages of the hosts and to construct the Boolean search statements required. This reasoning has stimulated a considerable amount of exploration and development work on the construction of search interfaces, to aid the inexperienced user to gain effective access to these databases. The aim of our paper is to review aspects of the design of such interfaces: to indicate the requirements that must be met if maximum aid is to be offered to the inexperienced searcher; to spell out the knowledge that must be incorporated in an interface if such aid is to be given; to describe some of the solutions that have been implemented in experimental and operational interfaces; and to discuss some of the problems encountered. The paper closes with an extensive bibliography of references relevant to online search aids, going well beyond the items explicitly mentioned in the text. An index to software appears after the bibliography at the end of the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to define the impact of the investment in training in education by the European Social Fund (ESF) in four Eastern countries, namely, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Hungary. Those countries have some political, cultural, social and economic similarities and share some common ground in the human resource development (HRD) sectors.

The authors use the human capital theory with some extensions to analyze the context, operations and impacts of the ESF in the Visegrad four (V4) countries between 2007 and 2013. The authors use three levels of methodology to access each one of those problems.

The authors conclude that the ESF helped building the vocational training system in those countries, and to help them get near the equilibrium of high skills of the V4 Western European neighbors, and therefore, this one was a success story. However, quality issues remain to be addressed that may hinder the continuation of the success in the future.

The research could be enlarged in time and space and deepened in terms of methodology. This is one a first clarifying step. Theoretical work should become aware of the dichotomy between absorption and scientific logic.

Detailed and precise evaluation practices must be implemented to guide and assess the policy.

Precisely because funds are scarce this paper enlights the dilemma and the tension between quantity and quality in the European HRD policy, this is an important social problem.

The study is original because even if the HRD in those countries had already been studied (Sheehan and Buchelt, 2016), no study analyzing specifically the ESF in those countries has been carried out so far. The authors use an innovative methodology and address questions on context, operations and impact, which are also innovative and very relevant.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the association between religious affiliation and the rate of return to human capital for German men and women.

This paper employs data from the 1997, 2003, 2007 and 2011 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel for German men and women in full-time employment between the age of 25 and 54. The association between religious affiliation and wages was estimated using a conventional human capital model.

This paper finds that Catholic men (women) received a wage premium of 4 per cent (3 per cent) relative to their Protestant counterparts, even after controlling for an extensive range of demographic, economic and social characteristics.

The study contributes to the literature by providing – to the best of the authors’ knowledge – the first results on the wage premium received by Catholic men and women in the German labour market.

This study examines the relationships between parents' and children's occupations to determine the existence of intergenerational transmission of occupations.

To achieve the purpose of the study, four predominant occupational types based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO): agriculture and forestry; services and sales; managerial/administrative; and professional/technical are examined using data from the latest (7th) round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS). Two complementary methods involving the correlational analysis and regression-based techniques are used.

The findings indicate the presence of parental influences on children's occupational choices (same-sex and cross-sex) in the Ghanaian labour market, with maternals and same-sector effects having a more substantial influence on children's occupational choices, especially in agriculture and forestry, and services and sales sectors.

The lack of panel data in observing children's occupational choices over time makes it challenging to assume direct causation.

The study is the first to highlight the relative strengths of paternal influence (father's effect) and maternal impact (mother's effect) on sons' and daughters' occupational choices in Africa. The findings have several implications for intergenerational (im)mobility of occupations including how policymakers can make career guidance more effective.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-10-2022-0705

We estimate the parental investment response to the child endowment at birth, by analysing the effect of child birth weight on the hours worked by the mother two years after birth. Mother’s working hours soon after child birth are a measure of investments in their children as a decrease (increase) in hours raises (lowers) her time investment in the child. The child birth endowment is endogenously determined in part by unobserved traits of parents, such as investments during pregnancy. We adopt an instrumental variables estimation. Our instrumental variables are measures of the father’s health endowment at birth, which drive child birth weight through genetic transmission but does not affect directly the mother’s postnatal investments, conditional on maternal and paternal human capital and prenatal investments. We find an inverted U-shape relationship between mothers worked hours and birth weight, suggesting that both low and extremely high child birth weight are associated with child health issues for which mothers compensate by reducing their labour supply. The mother’s compensating response to child birth weight seems slightly attenuated for second and later born children. Our study contributes to the literature on the response of parental investments to child’s health at birth by proposing new and more credible instrumental variables for the child health endowment at birth and allowing for a heterogeneous response of the mother’s investment for first born and later born children.

This paper aims to describe a method for efficient frequency domain model order reduction. The method attempts to combine the desirable attributes of Krylov reduction and proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and is entitled Krylov enhanced POD (KPOD).

The KPOD method couples Krylov’s moment-matching property with POD’s data generalization ability to construct reduced models capable of maintaining accuracy over wide frequency ranges. The method is based on generating a sequence of state- and frequency-dependent Krylov subspaces and then applying POD to extract a single basis that generalizes the sequence of Krylov bases.

The frequency response of a pre-stressed microelectromechanical system resonator is used as an example to demonstrate KPOD’s ability in frequency domain model reduction, with KPOD exhibiting a 44 per cent efficiency improvement over POD.

The results indicate that KPOD greatly outperforms POD in accuracy and efficiency, making the proposed method a potential asset in the design of frequency-selective applications.