What More Than Parental Income, Education and Occupation? An Exploration of What Swedish Siblings Get from Their Parents

Abstract

Sibling correlations are broader measures of the impact of family and community influences on individual outcomes than intergenerational correlations. Estimates of such correlations in income show that more than half of the family and community influences that siblings share are uncorrelated with parental income. We employ a data set with rich family information to explore what factors in addition to traditional measures of parents’ socio-economic status can explain sibling similarity in long-run income. Measures of family structure and social problems account for very little of sibling similarities beyond that already accounted for by income, education and occupation. However, when we add indicators of parental involvement in schoolwork, parenting practices and maternal attitudes, the explanatory power of our variables increases from about one-quarter (using only traditional measures of parents’ socio-economic status) to nearly two-thirds.

IQ and Family Background: Are Associations Strong or Weak?

“…We doubt though that simply adding mother's IQ would bring the explanatory power close to what the sibling similarity suggests. For example, attempts to account for the sibling similarity in long-run earnings by means of the education of both parents do not appear to capture much of the sibling similarity (Björklund et al 2008). We hypothesize that very detailed information about parental aspirations, attitudes and parenting practices is needed to account for the large gap between what sibling studies and intergenerational studies suggest about the role of family background factors.…”

The importance of family background and neighborhood effects as determinants of crime

“…Using survey data from the Stockholm Birth Cohort, Björklund et al (2010) show that parental involvement in school work, parenting practices, and maternal attitudes are important for generating sibling similarities in their adult incomes. In particular, a mother's willingness to plan and save for the future appears to matter.…”

“…Inspired by the approach used in Mazumder (2008) and Björklund et al (2010), we then go on to include potentially important family-wide variables, either one at a time or simultaneously, in the x if matrix. For example, consider the inclusion of parental income and education in x if .…”

“…After including these potentially important family characteristics as control variables (when estimating the variance components used to construct our sibling correlations), we assess how much of the sibling similarities in criminal behavior they account for. While this decomposition approach has been used to investigate the determinants of sibling similarities in income, health, and education (Mazumder 2008(Mazumder , 2011Björklund et al 2010;Anger and Schnitzlein 2013), it has not been applied to criminal behavior.…”

On the Origins of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Sibling Correlations

“…To assess the role of parental characteristics in generating sibling similarities we run an accounting exercise, where we re-estimate our sibling correlations controlling for observable parental characteristics (Mazumder, 2008;Björklund et al, 2010). Our results show that parental entrepreneurship status is quite important, with parental education and income a distant second; together, these factors account for 20 percent of sibling correlations, and around 5 percent of total variance.…”