We use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys to investigate the relative importance of family financial and human capital in the transition into self-employment. Specifically, we estimate the impacts of individual's own wealth and human capital and parental wealth and self-employment experience on the probability that an individual transits from wage-and-salary to self-employment. We find young men's own financial assets exert a statistically significant but quantitatively modest effect on the transition. In contrast, the parents' capital exerts a large influence. Parents' strongest effect runs, not through financial means, but rather through their own self-employment experience and business success. Copyright 2000 by University of Chicago Press.

In this paper, the authors examine the role of parental education in the human capital production function by estimating the effects of parental education on the education profile of wages. The analysis uses sibling pairs from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience of Young Men and Young Women. The authors obtained mixed evidence on whether parental education raises the return to education. Copyright 1996 by MIT Press.

In this paper we use the variance across siblings in school characteristics to estimate the effects of school inputs on wages. The analysis uses sibling pairs from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience of Young Men and Young Women. We find that teacher's salary, expenditures per pupil, and a composite index of school quality indicators have a substantial positive effect on the wages of high school graduates.