Parental Education and Offspring Outcomes: Evidence from the Swedish Compulsory School Reform

Abstract

We use the Swedish compulsory school reform to estimate the causal effect of parental education on sons’ outcomes. To this end, we use data from the Swedish military enlistment register on the entire population of males and consider outcomes, such as cognitive skills, noncognitive skills, and various dimensions of health at the age of 18. We find positive effects of maternal education on sons’ skills and health status but no effects of paternal education. One reason behind this result may be that the fathers affected by the reform did not face any labor market returns to their increased schooling. (JEL I21, J12, J24)

Intergenerational transmission of human capital: Is it a one-way street?

“…Meghir and Palme (2005) show that the reform increased educational attainment and led to higher labor incomes. Holmlund et al (2011) use the reform as an instrument for parental schooling to study the causal effect of parent's educational attainment on child's educational attainment, and Lundborg et al (2014) use a similar strategy to examine the effect of maternal education on the health and skills of sons. Meghir, Palme, and Schnabel (2012) use the Swedish reform to examine the effect of education on both the individuals affected and for their children.…”

“…An important feature of the reform is that the timing of the roll-out varied across municipalities, which gives us variation in reform exposure both within and between 1 The range of topics that has been explored includes, but is not limited to, the effect of parental education on children's educational outcomes (Black et al 2005;Magnuson 2007; Page 2009) cognitive and non-cognitive abilities (Lundborg et al 2014) and health (Currie and Moretti 2003;McCrary and Royer 2006;Lundborg et al 2014), the effect of parental health on children's outcomes Persson and Rossin-Slater 2014), and transmission of IQ and cognitive and non-cognitive skills (Black et al 2009;Anger and Heineck 2009;Gronqvist et al 2009;Björklund et al 2010). In most cases, studies that have looked into the causal effects of parental education have found positive and significant effects of increases in both or one of the parents' educational attainments on children's outcomes.…”

The intergenerational transmission of human capital: the role of skills and health

“…A closely related IV paper is Lundborg et al (2014b) who use exposure to the Swedish compulsory schooling reform in the 50 s as an instrument for schooling. Using the same data sources as in this paper, the results suggest that mothers' schooling positively affects cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, and health of their sons.…”

“…While a small and mostly instrumental variable-based literature has provided some evidence on potential mechanisms, much remains to be learned (see e.g. Currie and Moretti 2003;McCrary and Royer 2011;Carneiro et al 2013;Piopiunik 2014;Lundborg et al 2014b, and the literature review below. )…”

Who suffers from unemployment? The role of health and skills

“…3 Another literature related to ours has shown that immigrants are more sensitive to local unemployment and has pointed to the importance of favorable labor market conditions for assimilation (e.g., Barth et al 2004;Bratsberg et al 2006Bratsberg et al , 2010Åslund and Rooth 2007). 4 They also used the same registers in, for example, Lundborg et al (2014b). 5 Early in data period, males were typically called to undergo the military enlistment procedure the year they turned 19, whereas in later years it most often took place the year the individual turned 18.…”