The role of education in career inheritance in China

Abstract

Education is the main mode of human capital investment. The level of human capital based on education not only determines work opportunities but also influences the capacity of job achievement in the noncompetitive labour market. This work studies the impact of education on the occurrence and degree of occupational inheritance, empirically tests the heterogeneity of this impact against different backgrounds, and draws on the occupational choice model to analyse the mechanism of this impact through human capital. The results indicate that education has a significant negative effect on career inheritance and the degree of inheritance, which shows significant temporal heterogeneity due to market and employment system reforms; the closer the education level of parents and children is, the greater the probability of career inheritance. The impact mechanism test shows that education can address information friction in the labour market by improving workers’ information acquisition and utilization ability, as well as the noncognitive ability reflected by responsibility and patience, reducing barriers to human capital accumulation and thus negatively affecting career inheritance. Therefore, to guide occupational inheritance within a reasonable range and improve the job matching rate in the labour market, it is necessary to promote the high-quality development of education and improve workers’ comprehensive human capital level, including cognitive and noncognitive human capital, to enhance their career choice ability and sustained human capital accumulation ability. conversely, it is also necessary to further promote the development of the labour market, fundamentally reduce information asymmetry, and help workers make reasonable career choices.