Mums and their sons; dads and their daughters : panel data evidence of parental altruism across 14 EU countries

We study how fathers’ and mothers’ income satisfaction correlate with the income
satisfaction of their sons and daughters, as well as with other economic and sociodemographic variables. We estimate these correlations using data on parents and
children in households surveyed in the eight waves of the European Community
Household Panel-ECHP (1994-2001) for 14 EU countries. To assess the robustness of
simple correlations to we exploit siblings in the Panel and we investigate the sensitivity of the estimates to the inclusion of other control variables. We also adopt a multi-level random effects ordered probit specification that exploits step-parents in the data to allow
us to decompose nature from nurture effects. Our headline results suggest strong
altruism effects, but these estimated effects differ across countries, differ between mothers and fathers, and are different between sons and daughters.