Does Increasing Parents’ Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation? Evidence Based on Conditional Second Moments*
利用1979年全国青年纵向调查数据，通过条件二阶矩方法识别父母教育对子女教育的因果效应，发现观察到的代际教育相关性既包含因果效应也包含未观测能力的传递。
Abstract This article investigates the degree of intergenerational transmission of education for individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Rather than identifying the causal effect of parental education via instrumental variables we exploit the feature of the transmission mechanism responsible for its endogeneity. More explicitly, we assume the intergenerational transfer of unobserved ability is invariant to the economic environment. This, combined with the heteroskedasticity resulting from the interaction of unobserved ability with socioeconomic factors, identifies the causal effect. We conclude that the observed intergenerational educational correlation reflects both a causal parental educational effect and a transfer of unobserved ability.