Intergeneration Transfer of Human Capital: Results from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan

Abstract

We exploit a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of parental education on educational outcomes of their children when they are high school seniors. In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from 6 to 9 years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. We form treatment and control groups of women or men who were age 12 or under on the one hand and between the ages of 13 and 25 on the other hand in 1968. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for schooling. We employ this instrument to estimate the causal effects of mother's and father's schooling on their child's college entrance examination test scores in the years 2000-2003, on the probability that the child attended college and on the rank of the college attended. The schooling of each parent does cause their child to experience better educational outcomes. A one-year increase in the schooling of either parent raises the probability that the child attends one of the top six colleges in Taiwan by approximately 10 percent.

The Causes and Consequences of Increased Female Education and Labor Force Participation in Developing Countries

“…While acknowledging the possibility of selection, de Walque finds that adoptive mothers' education is strongly related to their children's schooling, more so than the biological mother's. Tsai et al (2011) use the same Taiwanese reform as Chou et al (2011) to show that exogenous increases in either mother's or father's schooling increased by 10 percent the probability that their child attended a top-6 college. Behrman et al (1999) and Andrabi et al (2012) find that the key human capital investment increased by mother's education is not necessarily her children's years of education but rather the amount and quality of teaching she does at home.…”

The Long Shadow of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Intergenerational Transmission of Education

“…The schooling interruption during the CR can be thought of as a natural experiment, but unlike other natural experiments in the area of education, schooling interruptions 1 See, for example, Holmlund et al (2011); Black and Devereux (2011); Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1994); Rosenzweig (2002, 2005); Bingley et al (2009); Sacerdote (2002Sacerdote ( , 2004; Plug (2004); Bjöklund et al (2006Bjöklund et al ( , 2007; Tsou et al (2012); Chevalier (2004); Black et al (2005); Oreopoulos et al (2006); Tsai et al (2011); Chevalier et al (2013). 2 There are a few studies which investigate the intergenerational effects of the 1959-1961 China famine on health and wages and generally find statistically significant intergenerational effects (Susser et al, 2008;Almond et al, 2010;Fung and Ha, 2010;Kim and Fleisher, 2010) during the CR affected a whole generation of youth (17 birth cohorts) and for as long as 1 to 8 years.…”