INDIRECT · Intergenerational Cumulative Disadvantage and Resource Compensation

The previous literature has not been able to successfully explain why the loss of the certain family resources does not show as a weaker attainment. Neither the country differences in socioeconomic inheritance seem to reflect the institutional differences between them. We argue that these problems have followed from ignoring resource compensation. The lost capital (economic, human/cultural or social) may be replaced with the other types or with the resources of someone else (the new or extended family members or neighbors). European and other developed societies can be distinguished by their abilities to influence the compensation of the loss of the parental resources rather than by their direct impact on inheritance.We study compensation in three analytic contexts:1) Life-course changes followed by the loss of parental resources. The specific events to be considered are parental bereavement, separation, unemployment and geographical mobility.2) Period changes in society reducing resources in many families approximately at the same time. The examples to be analyzed are economic recession, the inflation of educational credentials due to increasing overall level of education and changing family structures and family formation processes.3) Structural disadvantage associated with lower level of parental resources. The forms of inequality to be analyzed include the number of siblings sharing the parental resources and childhood neighborhood and the compensation of low resources with the resources of the parents of the spouse.We use high level Finnish register panel data to analyze the loss compensation after specific life course events. The results are compared to those acquired from German SOEP data and US-based PSID data. Multiple country comparisons are conducted using ESS. The project combines three novel analytic approaches: sibling correlation methods, conditional multinomial (event history) models and sequence analysis.""