IQ and Family Background: Are Associations Strong or Weak?
By Anders Björklund, Karin Hederos Eriksson, Markus Jäntti. Social Science Research Network, 2009
88 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract For the purpose of understanding the underlying mechanisms behind intergenerational associations in income and education, recent studies have explored the intergenerational transmission of abilities. We use a large representative sample of Swedish men to examine both intergenerational and sibling correlations in IQ. Since siblings share both parental factors and neighbourhood influences, the sibling correlation is a broader measure of the importance of family background than the intergenerational correlation. We use IQ data from the Swedish military enlistment tests. The correlation in IQ between fathers (born 1951-1956) and sons (born 1966-1980) is estimated to 0.347. The corresponding estimate for brothers (born 1951-1968) is 0.473, suggesting that family background explains approximately 50% of a person's IQ. Estimating sibling correlations in IQ, we thus find that family background has a substantially larger impact on IQ than has been indicated by previous studies examining only intergenerational correlations in IQ.
Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/811a57a4fd822f3dbb1e733d887bbaa3fa5d9b35
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In Education
In Sociology and Political Science
- Sandra E. Black
- Silke Anger
- D. Schnitzlein
- P. Devereux
- Rebecca Dizon-Ross
- B. Mazumder
- Magne Mogstad
- Debopam Bhattacharya
Citations in the corpus
- The Intergenerational Transmission of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities (2010, unknown): “While intergenerational correlations in cognitive abilities have been studied using large and representative samples (e.g. Black et al., 2009; Björklund et al., 2009), the research on intergenerational correlations of non-cognitive abilities suffers from several shortcomings (see e.”
- Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility (2010, background): “For example, Bjorklund et al. (2010) average over about 8 earnings observations per person (to reduce the role of transitory variation) and center these at age 34 (to minimize lifecycle bias).”
- Cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, and family background: evidence from sibling correlations (2016, methodology): “Comparing our results to previous findings for the US and Sweden provides no evidence that the differential in sibling correlations in economic outcomes can be explained by differences in the formation of cognitive skills.”