Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15254
Authors: Ureo de Paula; Orazio Attanasio; Alessandro Toppeta
Abstract: This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of socio-emotional skills during childhood, using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) in the United Kingdom. This dataset enables us to measure two dimensions of socio-emotional development: internalising and externalising skills. More importantly, we can use multiple measures of parents' skills collected during both their childhood and their adulthood. Whereas parent-child skills are strongly related when both are measured contemporaneously, they remain correlated when both are measured in childhood, with a stronger transmission observed from mothers to their children. Additionally, by leveraging the BCS70 data on socio-emotional skills for three generations, we estimate multi-generational persistence. Notably, we find a correlation between the grandmother's internalising skill and the grandchildren's skills, even after accounting for parental skills.
Keywords: intergenerational mobility; inequality; socioemotional skills; spectral gap; mobility index
JEL Codes: J62; D63; I21; J24
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Parental internalizing skills at age 16 (G53) | Child's internalizing skills between ages 3 and 16 (I21) |
| Parental externalizing skills at age 10 (G53) | Child's internalizing skills between ages 3 and 16 (I21) |
| Grandmother's internalizing skills (D13) | Grandchild's socioemotional skills (I24) |
| Parental skills (G53) | Child's socioemotional skills (I24) |
| Internalizing skills (G53) | Externalizing skills (Y80) |