Start Me Up – How Fathers’ Unemployment Affects their Sons’ School-to-Work Transitions
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), continuous-time duration models are applied to examine whether paternal unemployment delays sons’ school-to-work transitions and thus leads to a spell of early career non-employment. The results show that substantial delaying effects of fathers’ unemployment exist and that they are heterogeneous among educational groups. Therefore, paternal unemployment implies long-run intergenerational costs by hindering sons’ smooth school-to-work transitions which can be expected to have long-lasting negative labor market consequences.