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The aim of this paper is to investigate the linkages between intergenerational income mobility and crime for 27 OECD countries, considering different types of crime, family ties, enforcement, in terms of punishment rate and perceived quality of the legal system, redistributive outcomes and government expenditure.

Using the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM), the empirical analysis is conducted by coupling the principal components analysis with the hierarchical clustering. The variance tests verify the robustness of the clusters.

Income mobility is higher in those countries where there is high public investment devoted to education and high perception of rule of law to buffer the adverse effects of crime on income mobility. The redistributive policies must be oriented to better the wealth distribution and not only income equality opportunity to decrease crime and to increase income mobility. A plausible existence of “hidden” income mobility emerges from the linkages between income mobility and frauds.

More redistributive policies for education, income and wealth equality should be applied in those countries with low income mobility and high violent crime rates; higher punishment rates should be applied to reduce the rates of thefts and frauds in high income mobility countries.

The main contribution is the identification of what type of crime leads to downward income mobility, as well as the role of perceived quality of the legal system, government and family ties in the association between income mobility and crime, suggesting also the potential existence of “hidden” income mobility.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-07-2023-0520

The main aim of this study is to investigate the role of fathers and mothers in the intergenerational educational persistence for sons and daughters under two dimensions that characterize the clusters of countries: redistributive policy and governance.

Data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM), hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components and panel regression are used in this study to estimate intergenerational educational correlation and to investigate its determinants related to the parents’ and descendants’ education variables in 93 countries grouped in four clusters. The empirical analysis is differentiated by gender combinations of parents and descendants.

In the clusters of countries characterized by high inequalities and poor governance, our findings show that the role of the fathers is stronger than that of the mothers in educational transmission; fathers and mothers are more influential for the daughters rather than for the sons; parental educational privilege is the main driver of intergenerational educational persistence; there is an inverse U-curve in the association between educational inequality of the parents and educational correlation for the sons. Differently, in the countries characterized by high income, low redistributive conflict and better governance, the role of the mothers is stronger and education mobility for the daughters is higher than that for the sons.

The authors’ results remark on the importance of social welfare policies aimed to expand a meritocratic public education system including schooling transfers for lower social class students and narrowing the gender gap in educational mobility between daughters and sons. Social welfare policies should also be oriented to spread high quality child care systems that help to foster greater women equality in the labor market, because the strength of educational persistence depends on the position of the mother in the economic hierarchy.

The distinctiveness of the paper can be found in the fact that this study investigates the parental role differentiating by gender and coupling hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components with panel regression models. This allows us to have a sample of 93 countries aggregated in four groups defined in two dimensions: redistributive policy and governance. Amongst the determinants of educational transmission, we consider not only education’s years of the parents but also other determinants, such as educational inequality and privilege of the parents. We also identify the effects of investment in human capital and educational inequalities for the descendants on education mobility.