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Educated Mothers Are Good for Kids

, by Fabio Todesco, translated by Alex Foti
Chiara Pronzato, in a forthcoming article on the Journal of Population Economics, analyzes parental influences on the educational attainment of children and reverses the conclusion of much empirical literature according to which only the father's education counts

If comparatively more educated parents lead to better educated kids independently from genetically inherited talents, then a policy that promotes stronger education today will have long-term effects on the education of the next generation, leading to better health, higher productivity and wealth.

Simple regression studies have traditionally showed a strong correlation between the educational level of parents and their offspring, but have been unable to exclude that better school performance was just the result of genetic transmission. "When researchers sought to neutralize the effect of personal skills and other traits of the family environment, they reached contradictory results," writes Chiara Pronzato of the Dondena Center for Research on Social Dynamics of Università Bocconi in her "An Examination of Paternal and Maternal Intergenerational Transmission of Schooling", Journal of Population Economics (forthcoming). In most cases, researchers found a strong, positive paternal influence and a negligible maternal influence, although in some cases the exact opposite was found to be true.

Pronzato's paper, which analyzes the educational attainment of the childre of twins to control for the relevance of genetic transmission, and uses an ample set of Norwegian data, corroborates the strong influence of the father's education, but also finds a statistically significant positive effect given by the mother's education. So educated mothers do rear educated children. Slicing the sample by level of education, one finds that at higher levels the father's educational attainment dominates, while at lower levels the mother's education prevails. Past studies which found no maternal influence suffered from working on too limited data samples, Prozanto explains, or considered only better educated couples.