The literature on intergenerational inequality has not inquired so far the role that market competition can play in the intergenerational transmission process. In this article we assess this role from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective. From the empirical side, using a panel dataset on Italian workers, we find that the parental background wage premium significantly decreases when sector competition increases. This result is challenging and might signal that part of the intergenerational transmission of inequalities is related to non-productive abilities transmitted by parents – that we call relational capital – rewarded thanks to rents arising in non-competitive markets. However, parental background might hide both relational capital and unobservable abilities and we cannot exclude that some workers’ unobservable abilities are more rewarded in less competitive industries, even if further analyses run to deal with this issue lend support to the idea that relational capital plays a not negligible role. From the theoretical side, we propose a model – whose predictions are consistent with our findings – that sheds light on the crucial role played by the intergenerationally transmitted relational capital in rent-seeking activities by firms when markets are non-competitive.

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市场竞争和父母本底工资溢价：人力和关系资本的作用

迄今为止，关于代际不平等的文献尚未询问市场竞争在代际传播过程中所起的作用。在本文中，我们将从经验和理论两个角度评估这种作用。从经验的角度，使用关于意大利工人的面板数据集，我们发现，随着行业竞争的加剧，父母的背景工资溢价显着下降。这一结果具有挑战性，并且可能预示着代际间不平等的传播与父母所传递的非生产能力有关（我们称之为关系资本），这得益于非竞争性市场中产生的租金。然而，父母的背景可能同时掩盖了关系资本和不可观察的能力，而且我们不能排除某些工人的不可观察的能力在竞争较弱的行业中得到更多的回报，即使进行了进一步的分析来解决这个问题也支持了关系资本起着不可忽略的作用的观点。角色。从理论上讲，我们提出了一个模型（其预测与我们的发现相符），该模型揭示了世代相传的关系资本在市场不竞争时企业寻租活动中发挥的关键作用。