Why Educated Mothers don't make Educated Children? A Statistical Study in the Intergenerational Transmission of Schooling

Arbeitspapier

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. Researchers trying to control for unobserved ability have found conflicting results: in most cases, they have found a strong positive paternal effect but a negligible maternal effect. In this paper, I evaluate the impact on the robustness of the estimates of the characteristics of the samples commonly used in this strand of research: samples of small size, with low variability in parental education, not randomly selected from the population. The part of the educational distribution involved in any identification strategy seems to be a key aspect to take into account to reconcile previous results from the literature.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Discussion Papers ; No. 563

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Single Equation Models; Single Variables: Panel Data Models; Spatio-temporal Models
• Subject: intergenerational transmission ; education ; twin-estimator ; sibling-estimator ; power of the test

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Pronzato, Chiara
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Statistics Norway, Research Department
• (where): Oslo
• (when): 2008

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/192545
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET