Causal Effects of Parents’ Education on Children’s Education

The paper shows that parents’ education is an important, but hardly exclusive part of the common family background that generates positive correlation between the educational attainments of siblings from the same family. But the correlation between the educational attainments of parents and those of their children overstates considerably the causal effect of parents’ education on the education of their children. Our estimates based on Norwegian twin-mothers indicate that an additional year of either mother’s or father’s education increases their children’s education by as little as one-tenth of a year. There is some evidence that the mother’s effect is larger among poorer educated parents, while the father’s effect is larger among better educated parents. We also find that the effect of mother’s education is larger for daughters than sons. There is evidence that father’s education has a larger effect than that of mothers in both the USA and Norway, but the difference in the estimated parental effects is much larger in the USA and is statistically significantly there. One explanation for a smaller maternal effect is that better educated mothers work more in paid employment and spend less time interacting with their children. We test this hypothesis using a ‘matching estimator’ for Norway and find no evidence to support it; indeed children of otherwise identical mothers (on a number of criteria, including both parents education) who worked more in paid employment completed more years of education.