TY  - JOUR
AU  - Rothstein, Jesse
TI  - Inequality of Educational Opportunity? Schools as Mediators of the Intergenerational Transmission of Income
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 24537
PY  - 2018
Y2  - April 2018
DO  - 10.3386/w24537
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w24537
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w24537.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jesse Rothstein
Goldman School of Public Policy and
  Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
2607 Hearst Avenue #7320
Berkeley, CA 94720-7320
Tel: 510/495-0646
Fax: 510/643-9657
E-Mail: rothstein@berkeley.edu
M1  - published as Jesse Rothstein. "Inequality of Educational Opportunity? Schools as Mediators of the Intergenerational Transmission of Income," in David Card, organizer, "Youth Labor Markets" Journal of Labor Economics, volume 37, supplement 1 (University of Chicago Press) (2019)

AB  - Chetty et al. (2014b) show that children from low-income families achieve higher adult incomes, relative to those from higher income families, in some commuting zones (CZs) than in others. I investigate whether children’s educational outcomes help to explain the between-CZ differences. I find little evidence that the quality of schools is a key mechanism driving variation in intergenerational mobility. While CZs with stronger intergenerational income transmission have somewhat stronger transmission of parental income to children’s educational attainment and achievement, on average, neither can explain a large share of the between-CZ variation. Marriage patterns explain two-fifths of the variation in income transmission, human capital accumulation and returns to human capital each explain only one-ninth, and the remainder of the variation (about one-third) reflects differences in earnings between children from high- and low-income families that are not mediated by human capital. This points to job networks and the structure of local labor and marriage markets, rather than the education system, as likely factors influencing intergenerational economic mobility.
ER  -