We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioral problems, grade repetition, and obesity, using matched data from the female participants of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and their children. We address the endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting it with variation in schooling costs during the mother’s adolescence. Our results show substantial intergenerational returns to education. Our data set allows us to study a large array of channels which may transmit the effect of maternal education to the child, including family environment and parental investments at different ages of the child. We discuss policy implications and relate our findings to the literature on intergenerational mobility.
Authors

Research Fellow Yale University
Costas is a Research Fellow of the IFS and a Professor of Economics at Yale University and a Visiting Professor at University College London.

Research Fellow University College London
Pedro is a Professor of Economics at University College London and an economist in the IFS' Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (cemmap).

Research Fellow University of Surrey
Matthias is a research Fellow of the IFS, a Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Surrey and a Research Fellow at the IZA.
Journal article details
- DOI
- 10.1111/j.1542-4774.2012.01096.x
- JEL
- I21; I24; J13; J24
- Issue
- January 2013
Suggested citation
P, Carneiro and C, Meghir and M, Parey. (2013). 'Maternal Education, Home Environments, and the Development of Children and Adolescents ' (2013)
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