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The authors analyse how the association between parental background and adult children's earnings changes when net rather than gross children's earnings are considered and disentangle what such changes depend on: differences between pre and after taxes earnings inequality or reranking of individuals along the earnings distribution before and after taxes.

Using data from European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2011, the authors focus on two large European countries, Italy and Poland, with comparable levels of inequality and background-related earnings premia but very different personal income tax (PIT) design and estimate – at both the mean and the deciles of the earnings distribution – the association between parents' characteristics and children's gross and net earnings.

The authors find that in Italy the PIT reduces the magnitude of the association between parental background and adult children's earnings at the top of the distribution, while no effects emerge for Poland, and the reduction is mostly due to a decrease in earnings inequality rather than to a re-ranking of children along the distribution. The findings are confirmed when the authors simulate the introduction of a “quasi flat tax” regime in Italy.

The findings suggest that the higher the tax progressivity, the higher the background-related inequality reduction and the lower the intergenerational association, signalling that the degree of progressivity amongst children may be an effective weapon to reduce intergenerational inequality.

In the literature on intergenerational inequality, the role of taxes is usually overlooked. In this paper, the authors try to fill this gap and enquire how the PIT design affects the association between parental background and adult children's earnings.

This paper aims to explore the parental role in children’s food socialization. More specifically, it explores how the legacy of the past (i.e. experiences from the participant’s own childhood) works to inform how parents, in turn, socialize their own children within the context of food, drawing on theories of consumer socialization, intergenerational influence and emotional reflexivity.

To seek further understanding of how temporal elements of intergenerational influence persist (through the lens of emotional reflexivity), the authors collected qualitative and interpretative data from 30 parents from the UK using a combination of existential–phenomenological interviews, photo-elicitation techniques and accompanied grocery shopping trips (observational interviews).

Through intergenerational reflexivity, parents are found to make a conscious effort to either “sustain” or “disregard” particular food practices learnt from the previous generation with their children (abandoning or mimicking the behaviours of their own parents within the context of food socialization). Factors contributing to the disregarding of food behaviours (new influencer, self-learning and resistance to parental power) emerge. A continuum of parents is identified, ranging from the “traditionalist” to “improver” and the “revisionist”.

By adopting a unique approach in exploring the dynamic of intergenerational influence through the lens of emotional reflexivity, this study highlights the importance of the parental role in socializing children about food, and how intergenerational reflexivity helps inform parental food socialization practices. The intergenerational reflexivity of parents is, thus, deemed to be crucial in the socialization process.

We review previous research on intergenerational conflict, focusing on the practical implications of this research for organizational leaders. We explain how the interaction between the interpersonal and intertemporal dimensions of intergenerational decisions creates the unique psychology of intergenerational decision-making behavior. In addition, we review the boundary conditions that have characterized much of the previous research in this area, and we examine the potential effects of loosening these constraints. Our proposals for future research include examination of the effect of intra-generational decision making on intergenerational beneficence, consideration of the role of third parties and linkage issues, investigation of the effects of intergenerational communications and negotiation when generations can interact, examination of the role of social power in influencing intergenerational interactions, investigation of the interaction between temporal construal and immortality striving, and exploration of the ways in which present decision makers detect and define the intergenerational dilemmas in their social environments.

A major aim of contemporary research on multigenerational families is to investigate changes in intergenerational dynamics within the context of changing historical times. We highlight ways in which recent historical trends such as population aging, changing patterns of family formation and dissolution, changing life cycle boundaries and women’s increased laborforce participation have altered family structures, functions, and role expectations, especially those of women. Illustrating the usefulness of the life course perspective in family research, results from a longitudinal study of five cohorts of women are presented. Findings show that in midlife Baby Boom women are significantly more depressed and have lower self‐esteem than older cohorts of women, despite their earlier advantages. Work/family stress contributed to higher depression. Baby Boom women dissatisfied with their marriages were significantly more depressed in midlife than Silent Generation women, at comparable levels of dissatisfaction, suggesting the meaning of marriage may have shifted. Biographical and historical timing appeared to matter for the psychological functioning of Baby Boom women in midlife. Silent Generation women did not have to juggle work and family in the same way as Baby Boom women. Having started their child bearing at a later age, Baby Boomers were then confronted by a changing economy, the intensified demands of work and family and the growing contingency of marriage and employment.

Climate control needs have reached momentum. While scientists call for stabilizing climate and regulators structure climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts around the globe, economists are concerned with finding proper and fair financing mechanisms. In an overlapping-generations framework, Sachs (2014) solves the climate change predicament that seems to pit today’s against future generations. Sachs (2014) proposes that the current generation mitigates climate change financed through bonds to remain financially as well-off as without mitigation while improving environmental well-being of future generations through ensured climate stability. This intergenerational tax-and-transfer policy turns climate change mitigation into a Pareto improving strategy. Sachs’ (2014) discrete model is integrated in contemporary growth and resource theories. The following article analyzes how climate bonds can be phased-in, in a model for a socially optimal solution and a laissez-faire economy. Optimal trajectories are derived partially analytically (e.g., by using the Pontryagin maximum principle to define the optimal equilibrium), partially data driven (e.g., by the use of modern big market data), and partially by using novel cutting-edge methods – for example, nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC), which solves complex dynamic optimization problems with different nonlinearities for infinite and finite decision horizons. NMPC will be programed with terminal condition in order to determine appropriate numeric solutions converging to some optimal equilibria. The analysis tests if the climate change debt adjusted growth model stays within the bounds of a sustainable fiscal policy by employing NMPC, which solves complex dynamic systems with different nonlinearities.

Since the early 1990s there has been a growing body of research on intergenerational income elasticities and correlations. One of the most prominent findings is that these associations are much higher in the United States (and the United Kingdom) than in Canada, Australia and many European countries. This finding is often interpreted as America being much less fair than other industrialized societies since the reproduction of economic inequalities is substantially stronger. This chapter questions these conclusions on the following grounds: (i) inconsistencies with other outcomes, such as socio-economic inequalities in student achievement, educational attainment, occupation attainment and the patterning of intergenerational occupational mobility, (ii) family income having weaker effects on educational attainment (which has substantial effects on earnings and income) than other parental characteristics and (iii) methodological issues such as estimates based on the concept of ‘permanent income’ and the use of instrumental variables. Even if the consensus estimate of 0.4 for the intergenerational correlation in the United States is accepted, it may not mean that the United States is unusually unfair due to larger regional differences in labour market returns and/or stronger associations between parents’ and their children's ability, ability and education attainment, and education and earnings.

The emergence of an evidence-based medicine logic represents a major change in the large and complex field of American healthcare. In this analytical case study, the authors show that the intellectual school of evidence-based medicine became an important meso-structure that facilitated the growth of the new logic in American healthcare. The new intellectual school was a community of scholars who generated shared rules and resources through intergenerational mentoring. The school engaged in advocacy to advance new intellectual paradigms for conceptualizing healthcare quality that, when connected with material practices in the field of American healthcare, came to form a new institutional logic.

This chapter is not about the development of the child; I am making this clear from the outset because the title could easily be misinterpreted that way by the readers who are unacquainted with social studies of childhood. Although ‘development’ and ‘child’ are familiar concepts, which combined in notions of ‘development of the child’ or ‘child development’ are parts of a century long, successful and dominant discourse, the notion of ‘development of childhood’ is rather begging questions, such as if there at all is such a thing as a theory of childhood development and if we need it. To my mind the brief answer to the first question is ‘no’, but quite a few authors have made thoughtful formulations about it and about generational relations without necessarily having intended to be theory builders (cf. Alanen, 2009). The answer to the second question is ‘yes’, I believe we need such a theory to come to terms with how children's life worlds have changed and how they have related to contemporaries belonging to other generations – adulthood, youth and old age.

The twentieth century witnessed dramatic changes both in the population and in the family/kinship age-structure, which affected the prevalence, length, and form of relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. Although most European countries share similar trends, there are considerable national peculiarities which have an impact on the experience of grandchildhood.