Education as the (not so) great equalizer : new evidence based on a parental fixed effect analysis for Spain

Abstract

We investigate whether coming from a higher socio-economic background is associated with greater labour market success, net of own achieved education. We replicate previous analyses on the direct effect of social origin, net of education, for Spain using a more recent and larger dataset that consists of the merged monthly barometer surveys by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. Compared to previous studies, we use a more refined classification for the respondent’s education and perform a novel parental occupation fixed effect analysis that allow us to identify the specific parental occupations in which the strongest direct intergenerational transmission of socio-economic advantage occurs. We find that there is a substantial direct association between parental background and the respondent socio-economic status, income and household income, over and above the respondent’s level of education. This result provides additional evidence that questions the idea that education is the great equalizer. We also show that the strongest intergenerational direct transmission of socio-economic advantages occurs for respondents whose parents either exert power and influence in large organisations or are liberal professionals in law or university professors. In the appendix we provide the Stata syntax for recoding the CNO11 Spanish classification of occupations into an index of socio-economic status (ISEI) and into the EGP and Oesch class schemes.