Intergenerational Transmission of Welfare Benefit Receipt: Evidence from Germany
利用德国社会经济面板数据，研究父母领取福利对子女成年后福利领取的影响，发现强相关性主要由家庭背景而非福利经历本身导致。
We study the intergenerational transmission of welfare benefit receipt in Germany. We first describe the correlation between welfare receipt experienced in the parental household and subsequent own welfare receipt of young adults. In a second step, we investigate whether the observed correlations reflect causal effects of past welfare experience. We use family fixed effects estimations and Gottschalk's (1996) approach and take advantage of the long‐running German Socio‐Economic Panel Survey to contribute to a sparse literature. We find strong positive correlations between parental and own welfare receipt. These patterns do, however, not persist after controlling for unobserved heterogeneities. Therefore, our results suggest that the strong intergenerational correlation of welfare benefit receipt is determined by family background rather than by the experience of parental welfare benefit receipt.