Why educated mothers don't make educated children? : a statistical study in the intergenerational transmission of schooling
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http://hdl.handle.net/11250/180367Utgivelsesdato
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- Discussion Papers [1002]
Sammendrag
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.