Email
m.ventura@lse.ac.uk

Office Address
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE

Following in the family footsteps: Incidence and returns of occupational persistence 

Children often follow their parents in the same occupation. The literature has previously documented occupational persistence, but whether it has economic implications remains an open question. Using administrative data from the Netherlands and a unique policy experiment, this paper documents the prevalence of occupational transmission and estimates its effects and selection for medical doctors. I find that children are twice as likely to enter a parent’s field, with this rate substantially increasing for those above the top quartile of the parental income distribution. In addition, OLS estimated returns to occupational persistence are 2.5%. I focus on the medical profession to decompose these “naive” returns into a treatment and a selection effect of occupational transmission. I find that ’dynastic’ doctors experience a 24% income boost relative to their ’non-dynastic’ counterparts, corresponding to 58% higher returns from the medical profession. Furthermore, I identify a substantial negative selection bias in the OLS estimates, explaining why naive returns considerably underestimate the effects of occupational persistence. The large treatment effect together with the unequal incidence along the income distribution highlights the critical role of occupational transmission in exacerbating inequalities.

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Publications

Migration, Diversity and Regional Risk Sharing (with Luigi Ventura), 2021. Applied Economics, 2021.  
The economic consequences of migration have become the topic of many recent contributions in theoretical and applied economics. However, only a handful of papers have dealt with the implications of migration for risk sharing. We intend to fill in this gap in the literature by exploring the effects of migration and the ensuing cultural diversity on risk sharing in receiving economies, by using data on US states in the period 2000–2015. Our empirical results strongly suggest that migration enhances risk sharing in host economies, but non monotonically so. Moreover, cultural diversity is key in this risk sharing-enhancing effect of migration.

Working papers

The Economic Determinants of Crime: an Approach through Responsiveness Score (with Giovanni Cerulli and Christopher F Baum), 2018. Boston College Working Papers in Economics 948, Boston College Department of Economics.

Works in progress

"Call me when you get home". New technologies, and the safety gender gap: evidence from university students (with Silvia Barbareschi).

Placement Officer
Matthias Doepke

Supervisors
Camille Landais
Stephen Machin
Johannes Spinnewijn

References
Camille Landais 
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
c.landais@lse.ac.uk

Stephen Machin 
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
s.j.machin@lse.ac.uk

Johannes Spinnewijn 
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
j.spinnewijn@lse.ac.uk

Oriana Bandiera
Department of Economics
London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE
o.bandiera@lse.ac.uk