Does Family Background Affect Earnings through Education? A Generalised Approach to Mediation Analysis

Silvia Mendolia and Peter Siminski

No 9917, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We seek to quantify the role of education as a mechanism through which family background affects earnings. To this end, we propose a generalisation of statistical 'mediation analysis'. In our approach, the treatment and mediator can be multidimensional. This allows us to directly and flexibly account for a range of background characteristics which affect child earnings through the pathway of education and through other mechanisms. The results suggest that educational attainment explains 24%-39% of the overall family background effect on earnings in Australia. The mediating role of education seems to be larger for Australia than for the UK.

Keywords: equality of opportunity; intergenerational mobility; mediation analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C49 I24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Economics of Education Review, 2017, 59, 1-12

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9917.pdf (application/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:iza:izadps:dp9917

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 of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().