SMU SOE Seminar (Dec 7, 2018): Dynastic Human Capital, Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility

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TOPIC:

DYNASTIC HUMAN CAPITAL, INEQUALITY AND INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY

ABSTRACT We study the importance of the extended family – or the dynasty – for the persistence in human capital inequality across generations. We use data including the entire Swedish population, linking four generations. This data structure enables us to – in addition to parents, grandparents and great grandparents – identify parents’ siblings and cousins, as well as their spouses, and the spouses’ siblings. We introduce and estimate a new parameter, which we call the intergenerational transmission of dynastic inequality. This parameter measures the between-dynasty variation in intergenerational transmission of human capital. We use two measures of human capital for the child: GPA and years of schooling and three different measures of human capital of the members in the parental generation: years of schooling, family income and an index of occupational status. Our results show that traditional parent-child estimates miss almost one-third of the persistence across generations estimated at the dynasty level, and that over half of an estimate of the standard social mobility parameter is due to between-dynasty variation. In addition, we estimate the same models using a sample of adopted children, genetically unrelated to the parents and the extended family members. We then find that the extended family is at least as important as the parents, indicating that policies designed to increase families’ human capital can potentially have a large on children of extended family members. In addition, we find evidence of multigenerational associations, which persists even conditional on the outcomes of extended family members in the parental generation. We conclude that traditional child-parent estimates do not give a complete picture of persistence of human capital inequality across generations. Click here to view the CV.
		PRESENTER Mikael Lindahl University of Gothenburg
		RESEARCH FIELDS Labor Economics Applied Econometrics
		DATE: 7 December 2018 (Friday)
		TIME: 4pm - 5.30pm
		VENUE: Meeting Room 5.1, Level 5 School of Economics Singapore Management University 90 Stamford Road Singapore 178903

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