The Origins of Intergenerational Associations: Lessons from Swedish Adoption Data

Anders Bjorklund (), Mikael Lindahl () and Erik Plug ()

No 1739, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: We use unique Swedish data to estimate intergenerational associations between adoptees and their biological and adoptive parents. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad pre-birth factors, including genes and prenatal environment, and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad post-birth factors, such as childhood environment, for the intergenerational association in education and income. We find that both pre- and post-birth factors contribute to intergenerational transmissions, and that pre-birth factors are more important for mother’s education and less important for father’s income. We also find some evidence for a positive interaction effect between post-birth environment and pre-birth factors.

Keywords: intergenerational mobility; nature and nurture; income; education; adoption data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J30 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
Date: 2005-09
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://repec.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp1739.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Origins of Intergenerational Associations: Lessons from Swedish Adoption Data (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp1739

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().