Causal Effect of Parents’ Education on Children’s Education
| Title | Causal Effect of Parents’ Education on Children’s Education |
| Author(s) | John Emisch, Chiara Pronzato |
| Organisation | ISER at University of Essex |
| Date | May 2010 |
| No. of pages | 28 |
| Key words | family learning; learner attainment; educational attainment |
| Description | The paper shows that parents’ education is an important, but hardly exclusive part of the common family background that generates positive correlation between siblings’ educational attainments. |
| Select quotations | “Our estimates based on Norwegian twins indicate that an additional year of either mother’s or father’s education increases their children’s education by as little as one-tenth of a year. There is evidence that father’s education has a larger effect than that of mothers: one explanation is that better educated mothers work more in paid employment and spend less time interacting with their children. We test this hypothesis and find no evidence to support it.” “…comparing years of schooling of children of almost-identical mothers: mothers with the same age, same education, same number and age of children, and same husband’s level of education but different years of working career when their children were young (4 and 7 years old). We do not find evidence of any detrimental effect of time spent in the labour market on children’s years of schooling.” “…father’s education has a much larger effect than that of the mother, and the father’s education has a larger effect for sons than daughters.” “…the differential effect of mother’s education always favours daughters…the larger effect of their education on daughters suggests that a mechanism behind the effect may be through the effect of the mothers on their daughters’ aspirations and motivation – a ‘role model effect’ for short.” “There is some evidence that the mother’s effect is larger among less educated parents, while the father’s effect is larger among better educated parents.” “…there still remains much to discover about the aspects of ‘what parents do’ that enhances their children’s educational attainments and how these aspects are correlated with parents’ education.” |
| Link | http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/iser/2010-16.pdf |
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