A wealth of social science scholarship has established that better-off parents make greater investments in their children, contributing to social inequalities in child development and outcomes. Yet we know comparatively little about whether or not, and if so how, better-off parents continue advantaging their adult children. In this paper we leverage 15 years of highquality Australian panel data (n=87,196 observations; 16,628 individuals) to systematically examine how socio economic background, measured by parental socio-economic status, relates to the probability and amount of wealth transfers from parents to children. We provide novel insights into how transfer patterns evolve over the adult life course, are contingent on major life-course events, transitions and stages, and differ by socio-economic background. We also contribute methodologically by estimating random-effect Heckman selection models which combine the advantages of both panel regression and sample-selection models
