IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nas/journl/v116y2019p25386-25388.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Heritability of education rises with intergenerational mobility

Author

Listed:
  • Per Engzell

    (Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 1NF, United Kingdom; Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 1JD, United Kingdom; Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden)

  • Felix C. Tropf

    (Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 1NF, United Kingdom; Laboratoire de Sociologie Quantitative, École Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Économique, 99120 Palaiseau, France; Department of Sociology, Center for Research in Economics and Statistics, 99120 Palaiseau, France)

Abstract

As an indicator of educational opportunity, social scientists have studied intergenerational mobility—the degree to which children’s attainment depends on that of their parents—and how it varies across place or time. We combine this research with behavior genetics to show that societal variation in mobility is rooted in family advantages that siblings share over and above genetic transmission. In societies with high intergenerational mobility, less variance in educational attainment is attributable to the shared sibling environment. Variance due to genetic factors is largely constant, but its share as a part of total variance, heritability, rises with mobility. Our results suggest that environmental differences underlie variation in intergenerational mobility, and that there is no tension between egalitarian policies and the realization of individual genetic potential.

Suggested Citation

  • Per Engzell & Felix C. Tropf, 2019. "Heritability of education rises with intergenerational mobility," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116(51), pages 25386-25388, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:116:y:2019:p:25386-25388
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/116/51/25386.full
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tamayo Martinez, Nathalie & Serdarevic, Fadila & Tahirovic, Emin & Daenekindt, Stijn & Keizer, Renske & Jansen, Pauline W. & Tiemeier, Henning, 2024. "What maternal educational mobility tells us about the mother’s parenting routines, offspring school achievement and intelligence," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 345(C).
    2. Valentina S. Consiglio & Denisa M. Sologon, 2022. "The Myth of Equal Opportunity in Germany? Wage Inequality and the Role of (Non-)academic Family Background for Differences in Capital Endowments and Returns on the Labour Market," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 159(2), pages 455-493, January.
    3. van der Weide, Roy & Lakner, Christoph & Mahler, Daniel Gerszon & Narayan, Ambar & Gupta, Rakesh, 2024. "Intergenerational mobility around the world: A new database," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 166(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nas:journl:v:116:y:2019:p:25386-25388. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Eric Cain (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.pnas.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.