Cohort: SOMET 40

Topic of the thesis: Breaking the cycle of disadvantage: a cross-national analysis of the intergenerational persistence of poverty.

Abstract: The project examines how poverty is transmitted across generations in high‑income countries and how institutions, welfare regimes, and socio‑economic contexts shape this process. It focuses on the intergenerational transmission of poverty (IGPov), understood as the heightened risk that children who grow up poor will also be poor as adults, and argues that existing evidence is fragmented, often single‑country, and methodologically heterogeneous, limiting robust cross‑national conclusions. The overarching research question asks to what extent poverty persists across generations and which mechanisms and policies account for cross‑country and over‑time variation.
The project is structured in three parts using different data sources and levels of analysis. First, exploiting harmonized panel data from the Cross‑National Equivalent File (CNEF), it compares IGPov across a broader set of high‑income countries, including under‑studied contexts such as Japan, Russia, and Korea, alongside countries like the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and others. Second, it uses retrospective ad hoc modules from EU‑SILC (2005, 2011, 2019, 2023) to analyze intergenerational poverty persistence across European countries, focusing on how welfare regimes, social policies, and macroeconomic conditions mediate disadvantage, and on the methodological implications of relying on retrospective proxy measures instead of ideal longitudinal or administrative income data. Third, it develops an in‑depth case study of Italy, exploiting the panel component of the Bank of Italy’s Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW), combined with ISTAT census data, to investigate how timing and duration of childhood poverty, regional divides, family structure, and weak family policies jointly shape IGPov in a context marked by high persistent poverty and strong territorial and generational inequalities.

Research interests: poverty, social policies, intergenerational mobility, social inequalities

Graduated from: Università degli Studi di Milano

Degrees obtained: BA in Political Sciences, MA in Comunicazione pubblica e d'impresa - curriculum Data Analytics for Politics, Society and Complex Organizations

E-mail address:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.