Parental Education and Child's Education: A Natural Experiment

By A. Chevalier. Social Science Research Network, 2004

264 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Is the intergenerational educational link due to nature or nurture? In order to answer this dilemma, this paper identifies the effect of parental education on their offspring’s schooling attainment using a discontinuity in the parental educational attainment. The discontinuity stems from changes in the minimum school leaving age legislation which took place in the Seventies in Britain. This strategy identifies the effect of parental schooling only for parents with a lower taste for education and may not reflect the general social returns of parental education. However, since policies are more likely to target children at risk of not maximising their educational potential, the estimates are of interest. Contrary to recent evidence, we find a positive effect of both parents education on their children’s schooling achievements when focusing on natural parents only. Step parents have no or a negative impact on children’s education. In most cases, the endogeneity of parental education is rejected. These estimates suggest substantial social returns to education for same-sex parent. The estimates are robust to the introduction of additional controls for income, labour force participation, fertility and neighbourhood quality, indicating that the effect of parental education is direct.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d901d1d9a7448d5e2a1299aac71016a7b0cfa71

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Colm Harmon
2. I. Walker
3. Vincent O’ Sullivan
4. A. Chevalier
5. Stephen Machin

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Colm Harmon
2. Vincent O’ Sullivan
3. I. Walker
4. O. Marie
5. Stephen Machin
6. S. Vujić
7. A. Chevalier
8. P. Devereux

Citations in the corpus

• The Crime Reducing Effect of Education (2010, background): “Galindo-Rueda (2003), Chevalier (2004), and Chevalier et al. (2005) look at the effect of parental income on education of their children.”
• Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility (2010, unknown): “53 Chevalier (2004) uses a change in the compulsory schooling laws in Britain that occurred in 1972.”
• The impact of parental income and education on the schooling of their children (2005, methodology): “However, Chevalier and Lanot (2002) report that income effects are dwarfed by permanent family characteristics.”
• Why the Apple Doesn't Fall Far: Understanding Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital (2003, unknown): “…the effects of any unobserved parental characteristic (patience, ability) that may influence child outcomes.5 Closest to our paper is work by Arnaud Chevalier (2004) and Philip Oreopoulos et al. (2003), who use changes in compulsory schooling laws to identify the effect of parental education on…”