The Origins of Intergenerational Associations: Lessons from Swedish Adoption Data

By Anders Björklund, Mikael Lindahl, E. Plug. Social Science Research Network, 2006

482 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use unique Swedish data with information on adopted children's biological and adoptive parents to estimate intergenerational mobility associations in earnings and education. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad prebirth factors, including genes and prenatal environment, and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad postbirth factors, such as childhood environment. We find that both pre- and postbirth factors contribute to intergenerational earnings and education transmissions, and that prebirth factors are more important for mother's education and less important for father's income. We also find some evidence for a positive interaction effect between postbirth environment and prebirth factors.

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Citations in the corpus

Why Do Entrepreneurial Parents Have Entrepreneurial Children? (2012, methodology): “was pioneered by Björklund et al. (2006) who studied the intergenerational transmission of income and education. Other recent papers using the Björklund et al. (2006) methodology and similar data include Hjalmarsson and Lindquist (forthcoming) who study intergenerational correlations in crime and Ce”
Are Risk Aversion and Impatience Related to Cognitive Ability? (2009, background): “It suggests that contracts can be tailored to observable proxies for cognitive ability in order to select individuals on the basis of willingness to take risks or patience, traits that are of crucial interest to employers or insurance companies but are difficult to observe.”
The impact of parental income and education on the schooling of their children (2005, background): “For example, Bjorklund et al. (2006) uses a register of Swedish adoptees, which allows controls for both natural and adoptive parents’ education.”
The Demand for Social Insurance: Does Culture Matter? (2011, unknown): “The demand for social insurance and work regulations depends importantly on the availability of informal insurance, which can be a substitute for publicly provided insurance and redistribution (Bloch et al., 2008). Informal insurance can either be the family or close friends where insurance is more ”
The Labor Market Returns to Cognitive and Noncognitive Ability: Evidence from the Swedish Enlistment (2011, unknown): “Moreover, the genetic and cultural transmission of noncognitive ability could be important for understanding the intergenerational transmission of inequality (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 2002 and Björklund et al. 2006).”
The Transmission of Inequality Across Multiple Generations : Testing Recent Theories with Evidence from Germany (2018, unknown): “9 Related, Vosters (2016) and Vosters and Nybom (2015) show that the aggregation of multiple status measures into a single ‘least-attenuated’ estimate yields rates of persistence that are only modestly higher than estimates based on parental income only. 10 Capturing shared environmental factors by ”
Why Do Wealthy Parents Have Wealthy Children? (2020, unknown): “For example, Björklund, Jäntti, and Solon (2007) and Black et al. (2015) use information on the adoptees’ biological parents to control for their observable characteristics, hoping that any remaining bias is small.”