The Intergenerational Transmission of Schooling – Are Mothers Really Less Important than Fathers?

There is a “puzzle” in the literature on the intergenerational transmission of schooling, where twin studies emphasize the importance of fathers’ schooling, whereas IV-studies often emphasize the importance of mothers. We provide new evidence on this “puzzle” using register based Swedish data on the largest sample of twins used so far in the literature. In contrast to previous twin studies, our results confirm the importance of mothers’ schooling. We also provide the first twin-based evidence of role model effects, where our estimates suggest that only mother's schooling matters when allowing the effects to differ between sons and daughters. One additional year of mothers’ schooling raises daughter’s schooling by a tenth of a year, which is similar to some of the previous IV-based estimates in the literature. Finally, we bring in new US twin data that for the first time allow a replication of previous twin-based estimates of the intergenerational transmission of schooling in the US. The results show that that mothers’ and fathers’ schooling has no effect on children’s schooling in the US. Our results have implications for assessing the efficiency of policies that subsidize the schooling of men and women and are in contrast to most previous findings in the twin literature.