IQ and Family Background: Are Associations Strong or Weak?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We use a large representative sample of Swedish men to examine both intergenerational and sibling correlations in IQ. Since siblings share both parental factors and neighbourhood influences, the sibling correlation is a broader measure of the importance of family background than the intergenerational correlation. We use IQ data from the Swedish military enlistment tests. The correlation in IQ between fathers (born 1951-1956) and sons (born 1966-1980) is estimated to 0.347. The corresponding estimate for brothers (born 1951-1968) is 0.473, suggesting that family background explains approximately 50% of a person's IQ. Estimating sibling correlations in IQ we thus find that family background has a substantially larger impact on IQ than has been indicated by previous studies examining only intergenerational correlations in IQ. JEL Classification:J0, I0, J1

Cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, and family background: evidence from sibling correlations

“…Our estimates are based on data from SOEP, which is a large representative household survey that provides measures of cognitive skills from two ultra-short IQ tests, as well as self-rated measures of locus of control, reciprocity, and the Big Five personality traits. Previous analyses for Sweden and the US are restricted because they are based only on males (Björklund et al, 2010;Björklund and Jäntti, 2012) and/or use few non-cognitive skill measures (i.e., locus of control (Mazumder, 2008) and leadership skills (Björklund and Jäntti, 2012)) and are based on only a single measurement at one point in time. Hence, our study contributes to the literature by providing evidence on sibling correlations using broader measures and repeated measurements of skills and by including both men and women.…”

“…Intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills has been analyzed in the contexts of Scandinavia (Black et al, 2009;Björklund et al, 2010;Grönqvist et al, 2010), the US (Agee and Crocker, 2002), the UK (Brown et al, 2011), and Germany Anger, 2012). By contrast, the economic literature contains far less evidence on the intergenerational transmission of non-cognitive skills.…”

“…The transmission of personality traits from parents to children has been examined in the contexts of the US (Mayer et al, 2004;Duncan et al, 2005), Sweden (Grönqvist et al, 2010) and Germany (Anger, 2012). 2 A number of authors emphasize that estimating intergenerational correlations or elasticities reveals only part of the impact of family background (see, e.g., Björklund et al, 2010;Björk-1 See, for example, Heckman et al (2006) and Heineck and Anger (2010). An extensive overview can be found in Almlund et al (2011).…”

“…5 These cross-country differences might be attributed to different institutional settings in these countries, but the exact mechanisms remain unclear. To the best of our knowledge, existing studies of cognitive and non-cognitive skill correlations within families have covered only the US (Mazumder, 2008) and Sweden (Björklund et al, 2010;Björklund and Jäntti, 2012).…”

Intergenerational transmission of human capital: Is it a one-way street?

“…An important feature of the reform is that the timing of the roll-out varied across municipalities, which gives us variation in reform exposure both within and between 1 The range of topics that has been explored includes, but is not limited to, the effect of parental education on children's educational outcomes (Black et al 2005;Magnuson 2007; Page 2009) cognitive and non-cognitive abilities (Lundborg et al 2014) and health (Currie and Moretti 2003;McCrary and Royer 2006;Lundborg et al 2014), the effect of parental health on children's outcomes Persson and Rossin-Slater 2014), and transmission of IQ and cognitive and non-cognitive skills (Black et al 2009;Anger and Heineck 2009;Gronqvist et al 2009;Björklund et al 2010). In most cases, studies that have looked into the causal effects of parental education have found positive and significant effects of increases in both or one of the parents' educational attainments on children's outcomes.…”