ARC LP190100117
The challenge
Children’s life chances are strongly related to the family circumstances into which they are born. Education, wealth, income, and occupations are all passed from parents to their children, leaving children to largely ‘inherit’ their parents’ socioeconomic status. There is also an intergenerational link in worklessness and welfare dependence because children in welfare-reliant families confront more adverse events in adulthood. Growing up in a poor household does not always lead to later poverty, but we still do not fully understand how children escape intergenerational poverty.
The research
This Project aims to prevent poor Australian children from becoming poor adults by developing scientific evidence and creative policy approaches to overcome entrenched disadvantage. The Project will generate new knowledge on how social assistance dependence is linked across generations using new Australian data. Expected outcomes are the identification of i) the causal link between parents’ and children’s social assistance dependence; ii) the pathways through which youths overcome disadvantage; and iii) the role of family structure in transmitting disadvantage. Transforming the evidence base, the findings will have significant benefits in redesigning the Australian social safety net, promoting social and economic mobility.
The impact
Our results will yield critical evidence on how the design of the social assistance system impacts intergenerational disadvantage. Through partnership with the Department of Social Services, this evidence base will inform novel policy options for supporting vulnerable Australians. Our project will also build critical capacity in the use of big administrative data to address pressing policy issues, including training the new generation of researchers and generating the enduring codebase for the linked administrative research dataset.
Our researchers
Melbourne Institute - Sarah C. Dahmann, Nicolas Salamanca.
University of Sydney - Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, Hayley Fisher.
University of Cambridge - Kai Liu.
Erasmus University Rotterdam - Anne C. Gielen.
Our partners
Australian Research Council - this is an ARC Linkage Project (ARC LP190100117)