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

Chiara Pronzato

Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department

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. 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.

Keywords: intergenerational transmission; education; twin-estimator; sibling-estimator; power of the test (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Why educated mothers don't make educated children: A statistical study in the intergenerational transmission of schooling (2008)
Working Paper: Why educated mothers don’t make educated children? A statistical study in the intergenerational transmission of schooling (2008)
Working Paper: Why Educated Mothers don’t Make Educated Children? A Statistical Study in the Intergenerational Transmission of Schooling (2008)
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