Parental resources and the career choices of young workers

Grant description:

This project will investigate how parental resources influence the career choices of young workers, with a specific focus on the impact of parental resources on entrepreneurship and job mobility. Staiger hypothesizes that parental resources shape behavior by providing insurance and relaxing credit constraints. Using U.S. administrative data, he will exploit mass layoffs to estimate the causal effect of parental resources at the time of the layoff on the labor market outcomes of young workers. This is the first project of its kind to use administrative data rather than survey data to investigate how parental resources may impact young workers’ labor market outcomes. Specific outcomes to be explored include the relationship between a young adult’s parents’ earnings at the time of layoff on long-run expected earnings, job mobility, and entrepreneurial activity. The research represents a creative look at the relationship between inequality, innovation, and business dynamism.