Social origins and socioeconomic outcomes: A combined twin and adoption study

Abstract

Parents and children tend to have similar socioeconomic status (SES). The extant literature has emphasised the role of social mechanisms in intergenerational transmission, including the influence of the broader rearing environment as well as parental investments and aid, but often not allotted an important role to genetics. Accumulating evidence suggests that genetics play an important role in the transmission of SES from parents to children. Yet, estimates differ substantially across datasets, measures and methods. Using two research designs that account for potential genetic confounding, and high-quality data from Norway, we estimate the strength of the intergenerational social transmission of a range of SES indicators. By triangulating data and designs, we obtain estimates that are more robust to idiosyncratic modelling assumptions. Measures of Norwegian parents’ socioeconomic position predict their children’s socioeconomic outcomes, but purely social mechanisms only account for a fifth of the total explained variance in intergenerational transmission.