Labor Seminars Amsterdam

Speaker(s)
Magne Mogstad
Date
2010-06-01
Location
Amsterdam

This paper uses a rich Norwegian dataset to re-examine the causal relationship between family income and child outcomes. Motivated by theoretical predictions and OLS results suggesting a nonlinear relationship, we depart from previous studies in allowing the marginal effects on children’s outcomes of an increase in family income to vary across the income distribution. Our nonlinear IV and fixed-effect estimates then show an increasing, concave relationship between family income and children’s educational attainment and IQ. The linear estimates, however, suggest small, if any, effect of family income, because they assign little weight to the large marginal effects at the lower part of the income distribution.