Why the Apple Doesn't Fall Far: Understanding Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital

By Sandra E. Black, P. Devereux, Kjell G. Salvanes. Social Science Research Network, 2003

1,123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Parents with higher education levels have children with higher education levels. However, is this because parental education actually changes the outcomes of children, suggesting an important spillover of education policies, or is it merely that more able individuals who have higher education also have more able children? This paper proposes to answer this question by using a unique dataset from Norway. Using the reform of the education system that was implemented in different municipalities at different times in the 1960s as an instrument for parental education, we find little evidence of a causal relationship between parents' education and children's education, despite significant OLS relationships. We find 2SLS estimates that are consistently lower than the OLS estimates with the only statistically significant effect being a positive relationship between mother's education and son's education. These findings suggest that the high correlations between parents' and children's education are due primarily to family characteristics and inherited ability and not education spillovers.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67c781adecd5ca267be6b824e74a044fd28f66f3

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Citations in the corpus

The Intergenerational Transmission of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities (2010, positive): “35 which is close to what Black et al. (2009) have found for”
The Effect of Sibship Size on Educational Attainment in China: Period Variations (2008, background): “…Cleland and Rodriguez 1988) and offspring’s education (Ganzeboom and Treiman 1993; Shavit and Blossfeld 1993; Treiman and Yip 1989), although some recent studies suggest weak or nonexistent effects after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity (Behrman and Rosenzweig 2002; Black et al. 2005b).”
Long-Term Intergenerational Persistence of Human Capital: An Empirical Analysis of Four Generations (2015, background): “Dynamic macroeconomic models of human and physical capital investments, fertility and inequality, as well as models of cultural transmission, focus on the link between two consecutive generations (Diamond, 1965, Becker, Murphy and Tamura, 1990, Galore and Zeira, 1993, Bisin and Verdier, 2000, Mullig”
Earnings Returns to the British Education Expansion. (2011, background): “Moderate IV estimates of about 4-6% return to schooling have been found for some European countries (see Brunello and Miniaci (1999) for Italy, Levin and Plug (1999) for the Netherlands, Black et al. (2005) for Norway). However, Grenet (2009) for France, and”
The impact of parental income and education on the schooling of their children (2005, background): “Black et al. (2005) exploit Norwegian educational reforms which raised the minimum number of years of compulsory schooling over a period of time, and at differential rates between regions of the country.”
The Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Role Attitudes and its Implications for Female Labor Force Participation (2013, neutral): “…had typically been attributed to the role of the family financial background (e.g. Kerckhoff et al. 1985; Solon 1992, 1999; Mulligan 1997, 1999; Black et al. 2005; Long and Ferrie 2005), others have argued that it partially reflects the similarity in parents’ and their children’s preferences…”
Intergenerational earnings mobility in France : Is France more mobile than the US ? (2005, background): “2Following the terminology introduced in Black et al (2003), these two sources of intergenerational earnings transmission can be contrasted as originating from either a causation process (human capital investment under borrowing constraints) or a selection process (mechanical transmission of…”