Income trajectories after graduation: An intergenerational approach

Labor-market outcomes depend on educational attainment, but parental background also plays a role. By applying sociological perspective to income and combining the classical intergenerational approach with a study of intragenerational mobility, we analyze the direct association between parental background and achieved labor-market outcomes. We focus on income trajectories within the same level of achieved education by parental income. Using register-based data covering the whole Finnish population, we analyze those who graduated in 1995–2000 for eight years after graduation by means of repeated-measures linear regression. The results show that following entry into the labor market higher parental income is associated with higher incomes even after adjustment for education, labor market status, and childbearing. The effects of parental income are observed within all education groups except for those with highest education, and for men and women. We further demonstrate that parental income is associated with either higher starting level or faster growth of incomes within most education groups. The implication is that intergenerational associations are complex processes that are shaped across the whole life course.