specific knowledge of what it is about family background that really matters. Studies on intergenerational income mobility show … that parental income matters to some extent, but they also show that more than half of the family background and community … influences that siblings share are not even correlated with parental income. In this paper, we employ a data set that contains …

mother’s or father’s education raises children’s education by about 0.1 year. Our estimated income elasticities are around 0.1. …We explore the adoption data approach to estimating causal effects of parental education and income on the same … outcomes of their children. Thanks to a data set drawn from Swedish population registers with detailed information on …

adoptive parents. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad pre-birth factors, including genes and … prenatal environment, and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad post-birth factors, such as childhood environment …, for the intergenerational association in education and income. We find that both pre- and post-birth factors contribute to …