A test of the Becker-Tomes model of human capital transmission using microdata on four generations

Mikael Lindahl, Mårten Palme, Sofia Sandgren Massih and Anna Sjögren
Additional contact information
Sofia Sandgren Massih: Uppsala University, Postal: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden

No 2013:2, Research Papers in Economics from Stockholm University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We estimate the well-known Becker-Tomes (1986) model of intergenerational transmission of human capital. A Swedish data set which links individual measures on educational attainments of four generations, enables us to use great grandparents’ education as an instrumental variable. This approach was suggested already in Becker- Tomes (1986) but, because of the lack of data, never implemented. The identifying assumption, which holds within the Becker-Tomes framework, is that great grandparents’ education is unrelated to great grandchild’s education, conditional on the education of the parent and grandparent. We test the prediction that the structural parameter for grandparents’ education enters with a negative sign in an intergenerational regression model where the education of a child is linearly related to the education of the parent and the education of the grandparent. We fail to find empirical support for the model’s predictions.

Keywords: The Becker-Tomes model; Human capital transmission; Multigenerational effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2013-01-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lma, nep-ltv and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www2.ne.su.se/paper/wp13_02.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Test of the Becker-Tomes Model of Human Capital Transmission Using Microdata on Four Generations (2014)
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:hhs:sunrpe:2013_0002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Papers in Economics from Stockholm University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Stockholm, S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Jensen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).