I use Swedish registry data to estimate lifetime earnings returns to college and how they vary with observed and unobserved characteristics. The richness of the data also allows me to examine heterogeneity with respect to cognitive and noncognitive ability and parental earnings. Local instrumental variable analysis is used to recover marginal and average treatment effects under selection on gains. The findings support the notion of self-selection, but mainly on observed characteristics. Returns vary little with parental earnings but substantially with respect to both cognitive and noncognitive ability, thus suggesting important complementarities between formal schooling and informal skills.

Recently Gregory Clark and coauthors have argued that social mobility rates are constant across countries and lower than traditionally estimated, hypothesizing that prior estimates of intergenerational persistence are attenuated from focusing on a single proxy for underlying status. We test this proposition by incorporating multiple proxy measures into a “least-attenuated” estimate of persistence for Sweden and conducting a Sweden–United States comparison. We find no evidence of substantial bias in prior estimates or of similarity across countries. We further extend our analysis to mothers, finding that additional measures improve the ability to capture transmission from mothers to both sons and daughters.