Working Paper: NBER ID: w27823
Authors: Orazio Attanasio; Ureo De Paula; 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: socioemotional skills; intergenerational transmission; life cycle; British cohort study
JEL Codes: D63; I21; J24; J62
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 5 (G53) | Child's internalizing skills at age 16 (I21) |
| Parental externalizing skills at age 5 (G53) | Child's externalizing skills at age 16 (I21) |
| Parental internalizing skills at age 10 (G53) | Child's internalizing skills between ages 3 and 16 (I21) |
| Parental externalizing skills at age 10 (G53) | Child's externalizing skills between ages 3 and 16 (I21) |
| Grandmothers' internalizing skills (D13) | Grandchildren's skills (G53) |