EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The rising influence of family background on early school performance

Simen Markussen and Knut Røed (knut.roed@frisch.uio.no)

Economics of Education Review, 2023, vol. 97, issue C

Abstract: We use administrative data from Norway to examine recent trends in the association between parents’ prime age earnings rank and offspring's educational performance rank by age 15/16. We show that the intergenerational correlation between these two ranks has increased over the past decades, and that offspring from economically disadvantaged families have fallen behind. This has happened despite public policies contributing to leveling the playing field. We show that the expansion of universal childcare and, more recently, the increased teacher-pupil ratio in compulsory school, have disproportionally benefited lower class offspring. The rising influence of parents’ earnings rank can partly be explained by a strengthened intragenerational association between earnings rank and education among parents, as educational achievement has an inheritable component. Yet a considerable unexplained rise in the influence of family background remains, consistent with evidence pointing toward increased parental involvement in children's lives, plausibly in response to higher returns to education.

Keywords: Intergenerational mobility; Achievement gaps; Parental influence; Meritocracy; GPA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775723001383
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The Rising Influence of Family Background on Early School Performance (2023) Downloads
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:eee:ecoedu:v:97:y:2023:i:c:s0272775723001383

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2023.102491

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:97:y:2023:i:c:s0272775723001383