This paper examines the impact of parental schooling on the child¿s schooling and uses adoptees to get rid of persistency effects caused by the parents¿ genes. The results indicate that, especially for mothers, inherited abilities and assortative mating play an important role in the intergenerational transmission of schooling. In fact, for adoptees I found no treatment effect for the mother¿s schooling, conditional on her husband¿s schooling. It should be noted, however, that the WLS data on adoptees and their parents do not possess the properties of a clean and well-de¿ ned experiment, and that obtained results require a careful interpretation. There are two potential dangers to an adoption experiment. First, adoptees and adoptive parents are different from other children and their parents. This argument suggests that my maternal schooling estimates may be biased and suffer from omitted variables, but I have little indication of what these might be. The sensitivity analysis ruled out a number of plausible candidates. Second, adoptees are not always randomly assigned to their adoptive parents. This argument suggests that a portion of what is interpreted as the impact of the parent¿s schooling may in fact be genetic. With respect to paternal schooling estimates there is some merit to this view. However, with respect to the estimated maternal effect it is not. Nonrandom assignment and corresponding upward bias form no danger when interpreting the absence of maternal schooling effects. In all, these results, in combination with the parallel finndings of Behrman and Rosenzweig (2002) using twins, support the idea that the positive influence of mother¿s schooling on that of her child disappears when heritable abilities and assortative mating are taken into account.

This article examines whether gay and lesbian workers sort into tolerant occupations. With information on sexual orientation, prejudice, and occupational choice taken from Australian Twin Registers, we find that gays and lesbians shy away from prejudiced occupations. We show that our segregation results are largely driven by those gay and lesbian workers with disclosed identities and are robust to the inclusion of unobserved factors that are inherited and observed factors that strongly correlate with productive skills and vocational preferences. Our segregation estimates are consistent with prejudice-based theories of employer and employee discrimination against gay and lesbian workers.

When parents are more educated, their children tend to receive more schooling as well. Does this occur because parental ability is passed on genetically or because more educated parents provide a better environment for children to flourish? Using an intergenerational sample of families, we estimate on the basis of a comparison of biological and adopted children that about 55–60 percent of the parental ability is genetically transmitted.

We introduce a novel strategy to study the intergenerational transmission of human capital skills, net of genetic skill transfers. For this purpose, we use unique Danish data on children conceived through sperm and egg donation in in vitro fertilization treatments to estimate the relationship between child test scores and parental years of schooling. Because the assignment of donors is not selective, these parental schooling estimates allow for a causal nurture interpretation. Once we take account of genes, we find that only the education of mothers matters: the association between father’s education and child test scores (in reading and math) is insignificant and practically zero, whereas the association between mother’s education and child test scores (in reading, not in math) is significant and large, and as large as the association we estimate for mothers of non-donor children.

We review the empirical literature that estimates the causal effect of parent's schooling on child's schooling, and conclude that estimates differ across studies. We then consider three explanations for why this is: (a) idiosyncratic differences in data sets, (b) differences in remaining biases between different identification strategies, and (c) differences across identification strategies in their ability to make out-of-sample predictions. We conclude that discrepancies in past studies can be explained by violations of identifying assumptions. Our reading of past evidence, together with an application to Swedish register data, suggests that intergenerational schooling associations are largely driven by selection. Parental schooling constitutes a large part of the parental nurture effect, but as a whole does not play a large role. (JEL I21, J13)

This paper introduces a new IV strategy based on IVF (in vitro fertilization) induced fertility variation among childless women to estimate the causal effect of having children on their career. For this purpose, we use administrative data on IVF treated women in Denmark. Because observed chances of IVF success do not depend on labor market histories, IVF treatment success provides a plausible instrument for childbearing. Our IV estimates indicate that fertility effects on earnings are: (i) negative, large, and long-lasting; (ii) driven by fertility effects on hourly earnings and not so much on labor supply; and (iii) much stronger at the extensive margin than at the intensive margin.

We use unique Swedish data with information on adopted children's biological and adoptive parents to estimate intergenerational mobility associations in earnings and education. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad prebirth factors, including genes and prenatal environment, and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad postbirth factors, such as childhood environment. We find that both pre- and postbirth factors contribute to intergenerational earnings and education transmissions, and that prebirth factors are more important for mother's education and less important for father's income. We also find some evidence for a positive interaction effect between postbirth environment and prebirth factors.