The origins of intergenerational associations in crime: Lessons from Swedish adoption data

Abstract

We use Swedish adoption data combined with police register data to study parent-son associations in crime. For adopted sons born in Sweden, we have access to the criminal records of both the adopting and biological parents. This allows us to assess the relative importance of pre-birth factors (genes, prenatal environment and perinatal conditions) and post-birth factors for generating parent-son associations in crime. When considering the extensive margin, we find that pre-birth and post-birth factors are both important determinants of sons' convictions and that mothers and fathers contribute equally through these two channels. At the intensive margin, prebirth factors still matter, however post-birth factors appear to dominate. In particular, adopting mothers appear to matter most for the probability that sons will be convicted of multiple crimes and/or be sentenced to prison. We find little evidence of interaction effects between biological and adoptive parents' criminal convictions. Having more highly educated adoptive parents, however, does appear to mitigate the impact of biological parents' criminality.

Pre-Birth Factors, Post-Birth Factors, and Voting: Evidence from Swedish Adoption Data

“…The results suggest both pre-and post-birth factors account for a substantial and approximately equally large share of the parent-child resemblance in turnout. We also …nd evidence of a negative interaction between pre-and post-birth factors 1 See also Hjalmarsson and Lindquist (2013) and Lindquist, Sol, and Van Praag (2012), who study the transmission of crime and self-employment, respectively. in our maternal models.…”

“…A comprehensive discussion of these questions is also given in Björklund, Lindahl, and Plug (2006), Hjalmarsson and Lindquist (2013), Lindquist, Sol, and Van Praag (2012), and the references cited therein.…”

“…Previous Swedish adoption studies have relied on outcome variables that are readily obtainable from government records, such as educational attainment and income (Björklund, Lindahl and Plug 2006), crime (Hjalmarsson and Lindquist 2013), and self-employment (Lindquist, Sol, and Van Praag 2012). Therefore, these studies rely on the entire population of adoptees as well as a large representative sample of controls.…”

“…Overall, the sensitivity tests Table 4 Previous studies on income and education (Björklund, Lindahl, and Plug 2006), crime (Hjalmarsson and Lindquist 2013), and self-employment (Lindquist, Sol, and Van Praag 2012) all used data from population-wide registries to obtain a precise estimate of the population value of 1 . These studies …nd the sum of pre-and post-birth coe¢ cients in their adoptee samples (^ 1 +^ 2 ) are remarkably close to the estimate of 1 obtained from a very large representative sample of own-birth children.…”

The externalities of crime: The effect of criminal involvement of parents on the educational attainment of their children

“…The empirical findings of these studies support a causal relationship between parents' and children's education levels (De Haan and Plug 2009;Ermisch and Pronzato 2010;Holmlund et al 2011) and that parents" criminal behavior is transferred to their children (Farrington 2002;Van de Rakt et al 2010;Hjalmarsson and Lindquist 2011). …”