IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/jopoec/v25y2012i2p591-608.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An examination of paternal and maternal intergenerational transmission of schooling

Author

Listed:
  • Chiara Pronzato

Abstract

More educated parents are observed to have better educated children. From a policy point of view, however, it is important to distinguish between causation and selection. Previous research trying to control for unobserved heterogeneity has found conflicting results: in most cases, a strong positive paternal effect was found with a negligible maternal effect; in fewer cases, opposite results were found. In this paper, I make use of a sample of Norwegian twins to evaluate the impact on the robustness of the estimates when varying the sample size and when selecting different parts of the population. Results concerning the effect of mother’s education are very sensitive to the size of the sample, while the part of the educational distribution considered seems to be a key to reconciling previous results from the literature.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Chiara Pronzato, 2012. "An examination of paternal and maternal intergenerational transmission of schooling," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 25(2), pages 591-608, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:jopoec:v:25:y:2012:i:2:p:591-608
    DOI: 10.1007/s00148-010-0311-2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00148-010-0311-2
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s00148-010-0311-2?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Anders Björklund & Mikael Lindahl & Erik Plug, 2006. "The Origins of Intergenerational Associations: Lessons from Swedish Adoption Data," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(3), pages 999-1028.
    2. Light Audrey & Flores-Lagunes Alfonso, 2006. "Measurement Error in Schooling: Evidence from Samples of Siblings and Identical Twins," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 5(1), pages 1-35, May.
    3. Kate L. Antonovics & Arthur S. Goldberger, 2005. "Does Increasing Women's Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation? Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(5), pages 1738-1744, December.
    4. Altonji, Joseph G & Dunn, Thomas A, 1996. "Using Siblings to Estimate the Effect of School Quality on Wages," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 78(4), pages 665-671, November.
    5. David Neumark & Sanders Korenman, 1994. "Sources of Bias in Women's Wage Equations: Results Using Sibling Data," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 29(2), pages 379-405.
    6. Daniel Aaronson, 1998. "Using Sibling Data to Estimate the Impact of Neighborhoods on Children's Educational Outcomes," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 33(4), pages 915-946.
    7. Jere R. Behrman & Mark R. Rosenzweig, 2002. "Does Increasing Women's Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(1), pages 323-334, March.
    8. Sandra E. Black & Paul J. Devereux & Kjell G. Salvanes, 2005. "Why the Apple Doesn't Fall Far: Understanding Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(1), pages 437-449, March.
    9. Hertz Tom & Jayasundera Tamara & Piraino Patrizio & Selcuk Sibel & Smith Nicole & Verashchagina Alina, 2008. "The Inheritance of Educational Inequality: International Comparisons and Fifty-Year Trends," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 7(2), pages 1-48, January.
    10. de Haan, Monique & Plug, Erik, 2006. "Estimates of the Effect of Parents’ Schooling on Children’s Schooling Using Censored and Uncensored Samples," IZA Discussion Papers 2416, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    11. Orley Ashenfelter & David J. Zimmerman, 1997. "Estimates Of The Returns To Schooling From Sibling Data: Fathers, Sons, And Brothers," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 79(1), pages 1-9, February.
    12. David Neumark, 1994. "Biases in Twin Estimates of the Return to Schooling: A Note on Recent Research," NBER Technical Working Papers 0158, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Erik Plug, 2004. "Estimating the Effect of Mother's Schooling on Children's Schooling Using a Sample of Adoptees," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(1), pages 358-368, March.
    14. Bound, John & Solon, Gary, 1999. "Double trouble: on the value of twins-based estimation of the return to schooling," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 169-182, April.
    15. Ashenfelter, Orley & Krueger, Alan B, 1994. "Estimates of the Economic Returns to Schooling from a New Sample of Twins," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(5), pages 1157-1173, December.
    16. Jere R. Behrman & Barbara L. Wolfe, 1989. "Does More Schooling Make Women Better Nourished and Healthier? Adult Sibling Random and Fixed Effects Estimates for Nicaragua," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 24(4), pages 644-663.
    17. Behrman, Jere R & Rosenzweig, Mark R & Taubman, Paul, 1994. "Endowments and the Allocation of Schooling in the Family and in the Marriage Market: The Twins Experiment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(6), pages 1131-1174, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Pronzato, Chiara, 2008. "Why educated mothers don’t make educated children? A statistical study in the intergenerational transmission of schooling," ISER Working Paper Series 2008-11, Institute for Social and Economic Research.
    2. Hu, Yuan & Behrman, Jere R. & Zhang, Junsen, 2021. "The causal effects of parents’ schooling on children's schooling in urban China," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 258-276.
    3. Helena Holmlund & Mikael Lindahl & Erik Plug, 2011. "The Causal Effect of Parents' Schooling on Children's Schooling: A Comparison of Estimation Methods," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(3), pages 615-651, September.
    4. Black, Sandra E. & Devereux, Paul J., 2011. "Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 16, pages 1487-1541, Elsevier.
    5. Holmlund, Helena & Lindahl, Mikael & Plug, Erik, 2010. "The Causal Eff ect of Parent’s Schooling on Children’s Schooling," Working Paper Series, Center for Labor Studies 2010:8, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    6. Monique de Haan, 2011. "The Effect of Parents' Schooling on Child's Schooling: A Nonparametric Bounds Analysis," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 29(4), pages 859-892.
    7. Petter Lundborg & Martin Nordin & Dan Olof Rooth, 2018. "The intergenerational transmission of human capital: the role of skills and health," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 31(4), pages 1035-1065, October.
    8. Dong, Yongqing & Luo, Renfu & Zhang, Linxiu & Liu, Chengfang & Bai, Yunli, 2019. "Intergenerational transmission of education: The case of rural China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 311-323.
    9. Meng, Xin & Zhao, Guochang, 2021. "The long shadow of a large scale education interruption: The intergenerational effect," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    10. Erik Grönqvist & Björn Öckert & Jonas Vlachos, 2017. "The Intergenerational Transmission of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 52(4), pages 887-918.
    11. Victor Fernandez-Blanco & Maria Jose Perez-Villadoniga & Juan Prieto-Rodriguez, 2016. "Intergenerational Transmission of Musical Education," ACEI Working Paper Series AWP-01-2016, Association for Cultural Economics International, revised Jan 2016.
    12. Nicolas Fleury & Fabrice Gilles, 2015. "A meta-regression analysis on intergenerational transmission of education: publication bias and genuine empirical effect," TEPP Working Paper 2015-02, TEPP.
    13. de Haan, Monique & Plug, Erik, 2006. "Estimates of the Effect of Parents’ Schooling on Children’s Schooling Using Censored and Uncensored Samples," IZA Discussion Papers 2416, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    14. Damien de Walque, 2009. "Parental Education and Children's Schooling Outcomes: Evidence from Recomposed Families in Rwanda," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 57(4), pages 723-746, July.
    15. John Ermisch & Chiara Pronzato, 2010. "Causal Effects of Parents’ Education on Children’s Education," CHILD Working Papers wp05_10, CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics - ITALY.
    16. Kieron J. Barclay & Torkild H. Lyngstad & Dalton Conley, 2018. "The production of inequalities within families and across generations: the intergenerational effects of birth order and family size on educational attainment," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2018-002, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    17. Dong Zhou & Aparajita Dasgupta, 2017. "Understanding the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Evidence from a Quasi-natural Experiment in China," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(2), pages 321-352, May.
    18. Jingyi Huang & Yumei Guo & Yang Song, 2016. "Intergenerational transmission of education in China: Pattern, mechanism, and policies," Working Papers 415, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    19. Vikesh Amin & Jere Behrman, 2014. "Do more-schooled women have fewer children and delay childbearing? Evidence from a sample of US twins," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 27(1), pages 1-31, January.
    20. Lídia Farré & Roger Klein & Francis Vella, 2012. "Does Increasing Parents’ Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation? Evidence Based on Conditional Second Moments," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 74(5), pages 676-690, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Intergenerational transmission; Education; Twin-estimator; C23; I2;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models
    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:spr:jopoec:v:25:y:2012:i:2:p:591-608. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.