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Sibling Similarity and Difference in Socioeconomic Status: Life Course and Family Resource Effects

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  • Dalton Conley
  • Rebecca Glauber

Abstract

For decades, geneticists and social scientists have relied on sibling correlations as indicative of the effects of genes and environment on behavioral traits and socioeconomic outcomes. The current paper advances this line of inquiry by exploring sibling similarity across a variety of socioeconomic outcomes and by providing answers to two relatively under-examined questions: do siblings' socioeconomic statuses diverge or converge across the life course? And do siblings from demographic groups that putatively differ on the degree of opportunity they enjoy vary with respect to how similar they turn out? Findings inform theoretical debates over parental investment models, especially in relation to diverging opportunities and capital constraints, and life course status attainment models. We report three new findings. First, sibling resemblance in occupational prestige is explained almost entirely by shared education, and sibling resemblance in family income is explained almost entirely by the combination of shared education, occupational prestige, and earnings. This is contrasted to sibling resemblance in earnings and wealth, as siblings retain 60 percent of their resemblance in earnings once we control for education and occupational prestige, and siblings retain more than 30 percent of their resemblance in wealth once we control for all other socioeconomic outcomes. Second, across the life course, siblings converge in earnings and income and maintain stable correlations in education, occupational prestige, and wealth. Third, black siblings have significantly lower correlations on earnings and income than nonblack siblings overall, but black siblings dramatically converge in income across the life course -- in their twenties black siblings have a .181 correlation in income and above age 40 they have a .826 correlation in income -- suggesting almost complete social reproduction in income by the fifth decade of life for African Americans. This pattern does not hold for nonblack siblings. Furthermore, when we split the sample by class and age, we find the opposite effect: by age 40 and above, siblings from higher SES families tend to increase in their resemblance while those from lower SES families do not. Descriptive accounts about the openness of American society, then, strongly depend on which group we are talking about and at which stage in the life course we measure economic status.

Suggested Citation

  • Dalton Conley & Rebecca Glauber, 2005. "Sibling Similarity and Difference in Socioeconomic Status: Life Course and Family Resource Effects," NBER Working Papers 11320, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11320
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    2. Romich, Jennifer, 2009. "Trying to keep children out of trouble: Child characteristics, neighborhood quality, and within-household resource allocation," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 338-345, March.
    3. Damien De Walque & Deon Filmer, 2013. "Trends and Socioeconomic Gradients in Adult Mortality around the Developing World," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 39(1), pages 1-29, March.
    4. Vladasel, Theodor & Lindquist, Matthew J. & Sol, Joeri & van Praag, Mirjam, 2021. "On the origins of entrepreneurship: Evidence from sibling correlations," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 36(5).
    5. Joshua Angrist & Victor Lavy & Analia Schlosser, 2010. "Multiple Experiments for the Causal Link between the Quantity and Quality of Children," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 28(4), pages 773-824, October.
    6. Joshua D. Angrist & Victor Lavy & Analia Schlosser, 2005. "New Evidence on the Causal Link Between the Quantity and Quality of Children," NBER Working Papers 11835, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Anna Christina D'Addio, 2007. "Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage: Mobility or Immobility Across Generations?," OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 52, OECD Publishing.
    8. Adelaide AGYEMAN & Nicholas Nicodamus Nana NSOWAH-NUAMAH, 2015. "Demographic And Socio-Economic Characteristics Of Monozygotic And Dizygotic Twins In The Labour Market," Journal of Social and Economic Statistics, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, vol. 4(2), pages 19-41, DECEMBER.
    9. Baez, Javier E., 2008. "Does More Mean Better? Sibling Sex Composition and the Link between Family Size and Children’s Quality," IZA Discussion Papers 3472, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

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    JEL classification:

    • J0 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General

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