Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Is It a One-Way Street?

Petter Lundborg and Kaveh Majlesi

No 2015:22, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Studies on the intergenerational transmission of human capital usually assume a one-way spillover from parents to children. But what if children also affect their parents’ human capital? Using exogenous variation in education, arising from a Swedish compulsory schooling reform in the 1950s and 1960s, we address this question by studying the causal effect of children’s schooling on their parents’ longevity. We first replicate previous findings of a positive and significant cross-sectional relationship between children’s education and their parents’ longevity. Our causal estimates tell a different story; children’s schooling has no significant effect on parents’ survival. These results hold when we examine separate causes of death and when we restrict the sample to low-income and low-educated parents.

Keywords: Intergenerational transmission; Human capital; Longevity; Compulsory schooling; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I21 I26 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2015-08-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur, nep-gro and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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http://project.nek.lu.se/publications/workpap/papers/wp15_22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Intergenerational transmission of human capital: Is it a one-way street? (2018)
Working Paper: Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Is It a One-Way Street? (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2015_022

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