Parental Education and Child’s Education: A Natural Experiment

Is the intergeneration educational link due to nature or nurture? In order to separate the nature (genetic) and nurture (education) effects, researchers have relied on situations where two individuals are specifically affected by one or the other effects but not both; typically comparing twins’ offspring or natural and adopted children. These studies estimate that maternal schooling has no effect on her offspring education. In this paper, we propose an alternative strategy to identify the effect of parental education on their offspring schooling choices. Changes in the minimum school leaving age created a discontinuity in the education of parents due uniquely to their birth cohort. The effect of parental schooling is only identify for a group of parents with a distaste for education and may not reflect the social return that a policy increasing education for another group of parents may have. However, we reckon that this is the strength of this estimation strategy since the children of parents with a lower taste for schooling are likely to be the most at risk of not maximising their education potential. We find a strong positive effect of maternal education on their children schooling achievements. Keyword: Education choice, intergenerational effect JEL Classification: I20, J62 Acknowledgements: Data was made available by the Data Archive. Support from the Nuffield Foundation under the small grant scheme is gratefully acknowledged as well as Tarja Viitanen research assistance. This paper also benefited from the comments of participants of workshop at the Tinbergen Institute and Aberdeen University as well as the European Society of Population Economics (New York). * Contact: Arnaud Chevalier, Institute for the Study of Social Change, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Tel: +353 (1) 7168240, Email: [email protected]