Intergenerational Persistence of Earnings: The Role of Early and College Education

Abstract

Recent empirical evidence from the United States indicates a high degree of persistence in earnings across generations. Designing effective public policies to increase social mobility requires identifying and measuring the major sources of persistence and inequality in earnings. We provide a quantitative model of intergenerational human capital transmission that focuses on three sources: innate ability, early education, and college education. We find that approximately one-half of the intergenerational correlation in earnings is accounted for by parental investment in education, in particular early education. We show that these results have important implications for education policy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 344 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.