This paper studies the effect of parental education on the educational attainment
of children in the US for cohorts born after 1910. Importantly, we allow for cohort-specific
differences by gender. Our estimates show that paternal education has been more important
for the attainment of male children (paternal specialization on sons). However, maternal
specialization (on daughters) seems to have appeared only for cohorts born after 1955. We
interpret these results as evidence that fathers are ...
This paper studies the effect of parental education on the educational attainment
of children in the US for cohorts born after 1910. Importantly, we allow for cohort-specific
differences by gender. Our estimates show that paternal education has been more important
for the attainment of male children (paternal specialization on sons). However, maternal
specialization (on daughters) seems to have appeared only for cohorts born after 1955. We
interpret these results as evidence that fathers are more important role models for sons
while mothers are a more important reference for daughters. We argue that our results are
robust to the presence of hereditary unobserved ability and conjecture that both types of
gender specialization may have been present in earlier cohorts too.
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