Do Educated Women Make Bad Mothers? Twin Studies of the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital

“Does increasing women’s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation?” is the question posed by Jere Behrman and Mark Rosenzweig (2002) in their eponymous article. Their answer to the question is no. In fact, they conclude that raising women’s schooling may even lower the schooling of the next generation. In this paper, we show that Behrman and Rosenzweig’s results are not robust to alternative coding schemes and sample selection rules, and we show that the policy inference may be misguided. ∗Respectively, Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego, email: [email protected], and Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin, email: [email protected] †We thank Jere Behrman, Charles Manski, Robert Mare, Mark Rosenzweig, Jeffrey Wooldridge, participants in the Institute for Research on Poverty Summer Workshop and especially Vida Maralani, for instructive advice.