The Causal Effect of Parents' Education on Children's Earnings / Sang Yoon (Tim) Lee, Nicolas A. Roys, Ananth Seshadri.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lee, Sang Yoon (Tim).

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Roys, Nicolas A.

Seshadri, Ananth.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w32223.

NBER working paper series no. w32223

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2024.

Summary:

We present a model of endogenous schooling and earnings to isolate the causal effect of parents' education on children's education and earnings outcomes. The model suggests that parents' education is positively related to children's earnings, but its relationship with children's education is ambiguous. Identification is achieved by comparing the earnings of children with the same length of schooling, whose parents have different lengths of schooling. The model also features heterogeneous preferences for schooling, and is estimated using HRS data. The empirically observed positive OLS coefficient obtained by regressing children's schooling on parents' schooling is mainly accounted for by the correlation between parents' schooling and children's unobserved preferences for schooling. This is countered by a negative, structural relationship between parents' and children's schooling choices, resulting in an IV coefficient close to zero when exogenously increasing parents' schooling. Nonetheless, an exogenous one-year increase in parents' schooling increases children's lifetime earnings by 1.2 percent on average.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2024.