Abstract
We provide new evidence on some of the mechanisms reflected in the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Applying both an adoption and a twin design to rich data from the Swedish military enlistment, we show that greater parental education increases sons’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills, as well as their health. The estimates are in many cases similar across research designs and suggest that a substantial part of the effect of parental education on their young adult children’s human capital works through improving their skills and health.
Highlights
How much does the adult success of children depend on their family background? This question is of long-standing interest in the social sciences partly because the answer reveals something about the degree to which inequality is transmitted across generations
Recent literature has established that the intergenerational transmission of education partly reflects a causal effect of parental education
We focused on youth skills and health that could plausibly be important mechanisms for the intergenerational transmission of education and employed the most common methods used in the literature: the adoption and the twin design
Summary
How much does the adult success of children depend on their family background? This question is of long-standing interest in the social sciences partly because the answer reveals something about the degree to which inequality is transmitted across generations. We add to the literature on the mechanisms behind the transmission of education across generations by exploiting rich administrative data from the Swedish military enlistment records, where cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, and health have been measured for almost the entire population of 18-year-old Swedish males To these data, we have merged register-based information on parental education, including information on parents who are twins and parents who have adopted a child. We believe that our estimates appear reasonable, given the results obtained in previous studies on the intergenerational transmission of human capital and on the schooling returns to skills. Given the positive effects that parental schooling has on non-cognitive skills and health outcomes, this suggests that a major part of the transmission of education across generations runs through improved capacities of children.
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