Impact of Family Background on Cognitive Skills: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

This study desires to look at the impact of family background on cognitive skills of the children. On the basis of primary survey of two districts of West Bengal—namely Bankura and Nadia—and using the fathers’ education, occupation and per capita household income as the proxies for family background we have employed multinomial probit and ordered logit regression model for this analysis. The findings reveal that there exists a significant positive association between family background and cognitive skills of the child indicating the existence of poor intergenerational mobility in education in the surveyed region. JEL Codes: I20, I24, I28