Info
Foto sezione
Logo Bocconi

Press Room

| 09/02/2010
Educated mothers make educated children

Educated mothers make educated children

CHIARA PRONZATO, IN A PAPER FORTHCOMING IN THE JOURNAL OF POPULATION ECONOMICS, OVERTURNS THE RECEIVED WISDOM THAT ONLY THE FATHER'S SCHOOLING AFFECTS A CHILD'S EDUCATION. MUM MATTERS, TOO, EVEN IF TO A LESSER DEGREE

If more educated parents have better educated children irrespective of genetically transmitted personal abilities, a policy promoting education will have long lasting effects in the form of better education for the next generation and an improvement of outcomes in later life such as health, productivity and wealth.

Previous research using simple regression analysis has shown a strong correlation between parent’s and child’s education, but can’t rule out that a child’s better schooling performance is the outcome of genetic transmission. “When researchers have tried to control for ability and other unobserved characteristics of the parental environment, they have found conflicting results”, Chiara Pronzato of Università Bocconi’s Dondena Centre of research on social dynamics says in An Examination of Paternal and Maternal Intergenerational Transmission of Schooling (forthcoming in the Journal of Population Economics). In most cases, the researchers have found a strong positive father’s effect and a negligible mother’s effect (educated mothers don’t seem to make educated children), but in a few cases the opposite has been shown.

Pronzato’s paper, analyzing the education of the children of twins in order to control for the genetic transmission and using a huge Norwegian dataset, confirms the strong effect of father’s education but also finds a positive and significant – though smaller – effect of mothers schooling: educated mothers seem to make educated children. Dividing the parents in educational layers, though, she finds that in the top layer there is only a father’s effect and in the bottom layer only a mother’s effect.

Previous research showing no maternal effect was affected by insufficient sample size, Pronzato explains, or considered highly educated parents, for which she too only finds a positive effect of father’s education. This was possible because some researchers tried to control for genetic transmission including only adopted children, and parents who adopt have a better schooling than average. The few papers showing no father’s effect, on the contrary, considered less educated parents, for which Pronzato confirms an exclusive mother’s effect. These papers usually exploit reforms of compulsory schooling to mark people with different schooling irrespective of their abilities, and such reforms affect only the bottom educational layer.

Pronzato compares the results obtained using the twins dataset and a siblings dataset, concluding that the two are interchangeable only to some extent, with the important exception of the underestimation of the positive effect of an additional year of education of highly educated fathers when using the siblings dataset.

Fabio Todesco

E-mail fabio.todesco@unibocconi.it
https://www.press.unibocconi.eu
Barbara Orlando
Head of Press Office
Universita' Bocconi
Phone +39-02.5836.2330
Mobile +39-335.123.1716
E-mail barbara.orlando@unibocconi.it
https://www.press.unibocconi.eu
The research news source
The online newspaper

Events

Highlights

all