Education and Family Background: Mechanisms and Policies

By Anders Björklund, Kjell G. Salvanes. Social Science Research Network, 2010

527 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In every society for which we have data, people's educational achievement is positively correlated with their parents' education or with other indicators of their parents' socio-economic status. This topic is central in social science, and there is no doubt that research has intensified during recent decades, not least thanks to better data having become accessible to researchers. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize and evaluate recent empirical research on education and family background. Broadly speaking, we focus on two related but distinct motivations for this topic. The first is equality of opportunity. Here, the major research issues are: How important a determinant of educational attainment is family background, and is family background—in the broad sense that incorporates factors not chosen by the individual—a major, or only a minor, determinant of educational attainment? What are the mechanisms that make family background important? Have specific policy reforms been successful in reducing the impact of family background on educational achievement? The second common starting point for recent research has been the child development perspective. Here, the focus is on how human-capital accumulation is affected by early childhood resources. Studies with this focus address the questions: What types of parental resources or inputs are important for children's development, why are they important, and when are they important? In addition, this literature focuses on exploring which types of economic policy, and what timing of the policy in relation to children's social and cognitive development, are conducive to children's performance and adult outcomes. The policy interest in this research is whether policies that change parents' resources and restrictions have causal effects on their children.

Subfields: Education, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1052b115faa930e0b8a3ef4cb1f75448091771e3

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Citations in the corpus

Long-Term Intergenerational Persistence of Human Capital: An Empirical Analysis of Four Generations (2015, background): “First, as pointed out in Solon (1999) or Björklund et al. (2010), the “explained” variation in models based on siblings correlations is in general much higher than in models based on intergenerational correlations (around 0.”
Parental education, class and income over early life course and children's achievement (2016, background): “…in many developed countries, family background still plays an important role in the inheritance of social class (e.g. Breen, 2004; Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992), education (Björklund & Salvanes, 2011; Hauser & Featherman, 1976; Sieben, Huinink, & de Graaf, 2001) and income (Björklund et al., 2002).”
Academic Interventions for Elementary and Middle School Students With Low Socioeconomic Status: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (2017, unknown): “Keywords: systematic review, academic interventions, socioeconomic status, mathematics, reading Socioeconomic status (SES) is a major predictor of educational achievement (e.g., Björklund & Salvanes, 2011; Currie, 2009; Kim & Quinn, 2013; Sirin, 2005; White, 1982).”
Early Maternal Time Investment and Early Child Outcomes (2016, result): “These findings are in line with much of the evidence discussed in Blau and Currie (2006) indicating that the effect of non-parental child care is generally insignificant, and sometimes wrong-signed (see also the more recent studies by Bernal [2008] and Bernal and Keane [2010]).”