Direct and Indirect Effects of Grandparent Education on Grandchildren's Cognitive Development: The Role of Parental Cognitive Ability

Markus Klein,Michael Kühhirt

doi:10.15195/v8.a13

Abstract

The social stratification literature is inconclusive about whether there is a direct effect of grandparent resources on grandchildren's educational outcomes net of parental characteristics. Some of this heterogeneity may be due to differences in omitted variable bias at the parental level. Our article accounts for a more extensive set of parent characteristics and explores the mediating role of parental cognitive ability in more detail. It further tackles methodological challenges (treatmentinduced mediator–outcome confounders, treatment–mediator interaction) in assessing any direct influences of grandparents by using a regression-with-residuals approach. Using the 1970 British Cohort Study, our results show that the direct effect of grandparent education on grandchildren's verbal and numerical ability is small and statistically nonsignificant. Parental cognitive ability alone can account for more than two-thirds (numerical ability) or half (verbal ability) of the overall grandparent effect. These findings stress the importance of cognitive ability for intergenerational social mobility processes.

Highlights

The social stratification literature is inconclusive about whether there is a direct effect of grandparent resources on grandchildren’s educational outcomes net of parental characteristics
In a recent critique of this literature, Breen (2018) highlighted that identifying the direct effect of G1 socioeconomic characteristics on G3 outcomes is notoriously difficult as unobserved factors (U) causing G2 characteristics and G3 outcomes may lead to estimates of a direct G1 effect that suffer from collider bias
This article aimed to contribute to the literature on multigenerational mobility by investigating the role of parental cognitive ability in mediating the association between grandparent education and grandchildren’s cognitive ability

Summary

Introduction

The social stratification literature is inconclusive about whether there is a direct effect of grandparent resources on grandchildren’s educational outcomes net of parental characteristics Some of this heterogeneity may be due to differences in omitted variable bias at the parental level. Cb MULTIGENERATIONAL mobility processes have increasingly become of interest to social stratification researchers, partly as a reaction to Mare’s (2011) call to overcome the “two-generation paradigm” that dominated the literature for decades In this literature, the main interest is whether grandparents’ (G1) education or class has a direct impact on grandchildren’s (G3) outcomes (e.g., cognitive development, educational attainment) net of parental (G2) characteristics. That is, conditioning on G2 characteristics potentially opens up noncausal paths from G1 to G2 to U to G3, leading to biased estimates of direct effect

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