ABSTRACT
This chapter lists the possible channels that determine the association between parental characteristics and children's outcomes. It presents the conceptual framework where indirect and direct mechanisms – i.e. mediated or not by human capital accumulation – are explicitly distinguished. The chapter briefly discusses the measurement issues of intergenerational inequality in economic studies. It contributes to the empirical literature on cross-country differences in intergenerational inequality by investigating the role of various transmission mechanisms. The traditional economic view of intergenerational inequality focuses on the key role played by family background in the accumulation of human capital. The association between family background and children's educational attainment is analysed by means of ordered probit models run for each country. The chapter compares five European countries – Norway, Germany, France, Italy and the UK – which belong to different welfare regimes and are characterized by different values of the ß elasticity according to the most reliable estimates.
