The Mechanisms of Intergenerational Status Transmission in Modern Scandinavia

Gregory Clark and Martin Hørlyk Kristensen
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Gregory Clark: University of Southern Denmark, Danish Institute for Advanced Study, and LSE
Martin Hørlyk Kristensen: University of Southern Denmark

No 299, Working Papers from European Historical Economics Society (EHES)

Abstract: There is continued debate, with important social consequences, about how social status is transmitted between parents and children. In particular, how much does genetics as opposed to social causation matter? In an ingenious recent article, Collado et al. (2023), using an extended family lineage from Sweden and the outcome of years of education, claim that outcome correlations across relatives are inconsistent with genetic transmission. In contrast, Clark (2023) claims that a simple 3-parameter additive genetic model of social outcomes predicts well correlations as remote as 4th cousins in a stable way for England 1600-2022. In this paper we show that the genetic model of Clark (2023) fits the correlation in educational attainment for extended sets of relatives in modern Denmark and Sweden as well as the 20-parameter social causation model of Collado et al. Further, the parameter values in the genetic model for Denmark and Sweden are similar to those found for a variety of social outcomes in both pre-industrial and modern England.

Keywords: intergenerational mobility; social mobility; assortative mating; genetic transmission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 I24 J12 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
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