Which background factors matter more in intergenerational educational attainment: Social class, cultural capital or cognitive ability? A random effects approach

Mads Meier Jæger and Anders Holm ()
Additional contact information
Mads Meier Jæger: Danish National Institute for Social Research, Copenhagen

No 2003-05, CAM Working Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Applied Microeconometrics

Abstract: The sociological research literature on intergenerational educational attainment has highlighted three types of theoretical frameworks in explaining to what extent social origins influences people’s educational choices and possibilities. The three explanatory frameworks are 1) the socio-economic situation in the upbringing, 2) the “cultural capital” of the home (e.g. the level of education of the parents), and finally 3) the cognitive abilities of the individual. While all three explanatory frameworks have been shown empirically to be of significance in explaining people’s educational attainment when analyzed individually or two at a time, then only very few studies have simultaneously included all three frameworks and thus been able to present a coherent picture of the influence of social origins on educational attainment vis-à-vis individual ability. As a consequence very little knowledge exists on the relative significance of each of the three explanatory frameworks in explaining educational attainment when analyzed in a common, multivariate setting. Using data from the Danish Youth Longitudinal Panel Survey we analyse the relative significance of each of the proposed explanatory frameworks in explaining intergenerational educational attainment. By means of a multinomial random effects logit model we find father’s social class to be the strongest predictor of educational attainment followed by father’s level of education and finally cognitive ability. Furthermore, we find that the direct effect of father’s level of education is complex in that it to some extent is transmitted via cognitive ability and is more vulnerable to unobserved characteristics captured in the random effect.

Keywords: educational attainment; social mobility; multinomial logit regression; random effects model; Denmark (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2003-09
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ku.dk/cam/wp0910/wp0203/2003-05.pdf/ (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.econ.ku.dk/cam/wp0910/wp0203/2003-05.pdf/ [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.econ.ku.dk/cam/wp0910/wp0203/2003-05.pdf/)

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kuieca:2003_05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAM Working Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Applied Microeconometrics �ster Farimagsgade 5, Building 26, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Hoffmann ().