The impact of growing up poor in Europe.

The impact of poverty during childhood on individuals' economic outcomes later in life is a topic of active research and a major policy concern in many developed as well as developing countries. Existing literature has focused typically on the estimates of the intergenerational elasticity in income or earnings of parents and their offspring. (See among others, Altonji and Dunn (2000), Chadwick and Solon (2002), for the United States; and Björklund et al. (2001) for Scandinavian Countries; Blanden et al. (2007), Ermisch and Nicoletti (2007) for Britain; Mocetti (2007) for Italy; and Lefranc et al. (2010) for France and Japan.) Together, these contributions provide evidence from several countries, mainly suggesting that the United States and the United Kingdom tend to have higher rates of intergenerational persistence, and, hence, less socioeconomic mobility than other countries, while the Scandinavian countries experience the higher intergenerational mobility in earnings. Focusing on poverty (rather than earnings or income) persistence across generations, research has highlighted that growing up in a poor family raises the probability of falling below the poverty threshold in adulthood (see Jenkins and Siedler (2007) for a comprehensive survey on industrialised countries) (...)