A visitor takes a photo of recruitment posters at a job fair in Seoul on Nov. 15, 2022. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Feb. 6 (Korea Bizwire) — Children raised by parents with higher incomes will earn higher incomes themselves, indicating that socioeconomic status may be inherited, a study showed Sundy.
Lee Ji-eun, a senior researcher at the Korea Labor Institute, and Jeong Se-eun, an economics professor at Chungnam National University analyzed the Korea Labor & Income Panel Study and found a correlation between ‘father’s objective/subjective household income’ and the incomes of children born in the 1980s and 90s.
The father’s subjective household income is a list of responses to the question of “economic status of the father’s income when the respondent was 14 years old” categorized into five different groups.
The child’s income was based on the average salary earned from a regular job for three years. Irregular jobs like part-time positions and internships were not included.
The father’s objective household income is a list of household income when the respondent was 14 years old that was confirmed through actual data, categorized into five or 10 income tiers.
For each higher income tier for the father’s subjective household income (five-tier model), the income of children born in the 1980s and the 1990s jumped by 9.8 percent and 9.1 percent, respectively.
The five-tier model of the father’s objective household income showed that children whose father’s income level was in the fourth or fifth tier earned 9.8 percent and 9.1 percent more, respectively, than those in the first tier.
The 10-tier model showed that children whose father’s income level was in the 10th tier earned approximately 33 percent more than those in the first tier.
“There are differences in children’s income level based on the two extremes of how much their parents earned, showing that socioeconomic status may be inherited,” researchers said.
H. M. Kang (hmkang@koreabizwire.com)
