With Xavier St-Denis (INRS)
On Thursday, January 30th, 2025, 12:30 p.m. to 13:30 p.m.
Free virtual and in-person event
Mandatory registrations
385, Sherbrooke East Street, Montreal, QC
Note: The presentation will be in French. Questions may be asked in English.
Description
Does the income level of grandparents influence the participation in postsecondary studies of their grandchildren beyond the indirect influence through parental income? We answer this question using a multigenerational sample drawn from Canadian tax data. We also explore the presence of a compensatory effect: can high-income grandparents compensate for the disadvantage of having low-income parents? Our methodological contribution shows how Canadian tax data can be exploited to study extended family networks despite significant data limitations.
Our study expands our understanding of the processes of social mobility in Canada while emphasizing how cycles of advantage and disadvantage persist across multiple generations. Our results suggest that focusing exclusively on parent-child transmission may underestimate the extent of social reproduction and overestimate the degree of social mobility in Canadian society.