The Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Evidence from the Golden Age of Upward Mobility

David Card, Ciprian Domnisoru and Lowell Taylor

No 25000, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We use 1940 Census data to study the intergenerational transmission of human capital for children born in the 1920s and educated during an era of expanding but unequally distributed public school resources. Looking at the gains in educational attainment between parents and children, we document lower average mobility rates for blacks than whites, but wide variation across states and counties for both races. We show that schooling choices of white children were highly responsive to the quality of local schools, with bigger effects for the children of less-educated parents. We then narrow our focus to black families in the South, where state-wide minimum teacher salary laws created sharp differences in teacher wages between adjacent counties. These differences had large impacts on schooling attainment, suggesting an important causal role for school quality in mediating upward mobility

JEL-codes: I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lab, nep-ltv and nep-ure
Note: LS
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Published as David Card & Ciprian Domnisoru & Lowell Taylor, 2022. "The Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Evidence from the Golden Age of Upward Mobility," Journal of Labor Economics, vol 40(S1), pages S39-S95.

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Journal Article: The Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Evidence from the Golden Age of Upward Mobility (2022)
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