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The ORU model has become one of the most accustomed ways to measure the joint impact of required level of education of the job and the education-occupation matching of the worker on their earnings. The broader implications of overeducation and undereducation for socio-economic stratification are however less straightforward. This study contributes to our understanding of the long-term and far-reaching consequences of education-occupation matching by estimating the ORU parameters of parents for the earnings levels of their offspring. After introduction of the “intergenerational ORU model,” we measure associations between parental ORU (overeducation, required education, and undereducation) and earnings among individuals during occupational maturity in the United States (using the NLSY79) and the United Kingdom (using the UKHLS). Results echo findings from the standard ORU model. Years of “matched education-occupation” (R) of the parents’ job increases offspring earnings by about 9.9% (US) and about 8.2% (UK), while years of parents’ “surplus occupation” (U) increases offspring earnings by about 4.0% (US) and about 3.7% (UK). We find a positive effect of “surplus education” (O) in the US, but not the UK. Similar to intergenerational mobility models, parental ORU estimates are moderated by offspring own education yet remain statistically significant. Further analyses explore gender differences in both generations. Implications for ORU research and intergenerational mobility research are discussed.

There is a wide-spread idea that contemporary careers continue to become ever more complex. Pioneering research of full-career complexity has shown that work lives have indeed become more complex, yet at modest increasing pace. This paper examines whether career complexity continues to increase using Swedish registry data across an exceptionally long time period, including younger cohorts than in previous research: up to those born in 1983. The full early- and midcareers of selected birth cohorts cover several macroeconomic booms and downturns, a long period of upskilling of the Swedish labor force, as well as the convergence of working hours of women and men. The following conclusions are drawn using state-of-the-art methods of measuring career complexity. For early-careers, an increasing complexity trend is evident between the 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts, yet complexity fluctuates around a stable trend for the 1970s birth cohorts and onward. For mid-careers, which are considerably more stable on average, complexity has decreased among women born between the 1930s and the early-1950s. However, the opposite trend holds true for men, resulting in gender convergence of complexity. We observe a standstill of the mid-career complexity trend across both genders, followed by a modest decline for the last observed cohorts. Subsequent analyses point to educational expansion as an important driver of the initial increase of early-career complexity. Taken together, our analysis affirms an initial shift to more career complexity in the 20th century, yet we find no unidirectional trend toward more career complexity over the last decades.