Parental education and offspring wealth attainment across Europe

This paper originally investigates intergenerational wealth inequalities across European countries over the past two decades. Employing a modified socioeconomic attainment model, we identify three primary micro level channels linking social origin to offspring wealth attainment: education, income, and wealth transfers. These channels can be scaled up at the country level to capture the structure of intergenerational rigidities. Empirically, the study examines how wealth stratification by social origin can be predicted by intergenerational rigidities in education, income, and wealth transfers. Aggregate intergenerational measures are computed leveraging about 600,000 individual observations from 31 European countries in 3 points in time (2005, 2011, 2019) from EU-SILC data, with parental education serving as the measure of social origin. Complementing previous single country studies, our findings reveal that wealth attainment is substantially stratified by parental education in most, if not in all, European countries. Moreover, its cross-country and cross-temporal heterogeneity is consistently predicted by intergenerational rigidities in education, income, and wealth transfers. This study contributes to the comparative literature on wealth inequality by underscoring its strong interconnection with established origin-related inequalities in socioeconomic attainment.