published as 'Estimating the Effect of Mother's Schooling on Children's Schooling Using a Sample of Adoptees' in: American Economic Review, 2004, 94 (1), 358-368
The problem with most intergenerational mobility estimates is that unmeasured and inherited
abilities prevent us from drawing inferences. In this paper we estimate the intergenerational
mobility of schooling and exploit differences between adopted and own birth children to
obtain genetically unbiased estimates. Our results provide a much better insight on whether
parents (and policy makers) can actually stimulate the educational attainment of future
generations. Controlling for inherited abilities and assortative mating we find that the
association between mother's (but not father's) and child schooling disappears.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.