We apply Haider and Solon’s generalized errors‐in‐variables model to Swedish income tax data to produce estimates of the association between current and lifetime income. Our estimates demonstrate strong life‐cycle patterns. This implies that the widespread use of current income as a proxy for lifetime income leads to inconsistent parameter estimates (i.e., life‐cycle bias) even when the proxy is used as the dependent variable. Estimates for comparable cohorts of Swedish and American men demonstrate surprising similarities. There are, however, significant gender and cohort differences in this association that lead to statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful differences in life‐cycle biases.

We explore the origins of the intergenerational association in entrepreneurship using Swedish adoption data that allow us to quantify the relative importance of prebirth and postbirth factors. We find that parental entrepreneurship increases the probability of children’s entrepreneurship by about 60%. For adoptees, both biological and adoptive parents make significant contributions to this association. These contributions, however, are quite different in size. Postbirth factors account for twice as much as prebirth factors in our decomposition of the intergenerational association in entrepreneurship. We investigate several candidate explanations for this large postbirth factor and present suggestive evidence in favor of role modeling.

We construct a simple model, consistent with Becker and Tomes, that decomposes the intergenerational income elasticity into the causal effect of financial resources, the mechanistic transmission of human capital, and the role that human capital plays in the determination of fathers’ permanent incomes. We show how a particular set of instrumental variables could separately identify the money and human capital transmission effects. Using data from a 35 percent sample of Swedish sons and their fathers, we show that only a minority of the intergenerational income elasticity can be plausibly attributed to the causal effect of fathers’ financial resources.