Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/201481 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2017:3
Publisher: 
Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), Uppsala
Abstract: 
We study the role of family wealth for children's educational achievement using novel and unique Swedish register data. In particular, we focus on the relationship between grandparents' wealth and their grandchildren's educational achievement. Doing so allows us to reliably establish the independent role of wealth in contributing to long-term inequalities in opportunity. We use regression models with rich controls to account for observed socioeconomic characteristics of families, cousin fixed effects to net out potentially unobserved grandparental effects, and marginal structural models to account for endogenous selection. We find substantial associations between grandparents' wealth and their grandchildren's grade point averages (GPA) in the 9th grade that are only partly mediated by the socioeconomic characteristics and wealth of parents. Our findings indicate that family wealth inequality - even in a comparatively egalitarian context like Sweden - has profound consequences for the distribution of opportunity across multiple generations. We posit that our estimates of the long-term consequences of wealth inequality may be conservative for nations other than Sweden, like the U.S., where family wealth - in addition to its insurance and normative functions - allows the direct purchase of educational quality and access.
Subjects: 
Wealth
education
intergenerational transmissions
social mobility
JEL: 
D31
I24
J24
J62
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
893.69 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.