Education and the Family : Essays in Empirical Labour Economics

Abstract: Estimating Long-Term Consequences of Teenage Childbearing: An Examination of the Siblings ApproachIn the study of the consequences of teenage motherhood, the siblings approach has been proposed as a strategy to control for unobserved family background. Revisiting this literature, my contribution in adopting the siblings approach lies in controlling for heterogeneity within the family by using pre-motherhood school performance, a characteristic that differs across sisters. My findings confirm the presumption that within-family heterogeneity can result in biased sibling estimates.Estimating Intergenerational Schooling Effects: A Comparison of MethodsRecent studies that aim to estimate the causal link between the education of parents and their children provide evidence that is far from conclusive. This paper explores why. There are a number of possible explanations. One is that these studies rely on different data sources, gathered in different countries at different times. Another one is that these studies use different identification strategies. Three identification strategies are currently in use: identical twins; adoptees; and instrumental variables. In this paper we apply each of these three strategies to one particular Swedish data set, with the purpose to explain the disparate evidence in the recent literature. Our findings indicate that the estimated impact of parental education on that of their child in Sweden does depend on identification, which suggests that country and cohort differences do not lie behind the observed disparities.Intergenerational Mobility and Assortative Mating: Effects of An Educational ReformThis paper provides new evidence on the role of the educational system for intergenerational mobility. I evaluate an educational reform, implemented in Sweden in the 1950s, which postponed ability tracking and extended compulsory education from seven to nine years. The reform may have influenced intergenerational mobility by several different mechanisms, both directly and indirectly through changing the degree of assortative mating. My results indicate that the reform indeed resulted in a sizeable increase in intergenerational income mobility, and in a lower educational association between children and parents. The reform also contributed to reducing the association in education between an individual’s partner and parents, which I interpret as an effect operating through reform effects on mating patterns.Is the Gender Gap in School Performance Affected by the Sex of the Teacher?Girls outperform boys in school. We investigate whether the gender performance gap can be attributed to the fact that the teacher profession is female dominated, that is, is there a causal effect on student outcomes from having a same-sex teacher? Exploring the fact that teacher turnover and student mobility give rise to variation in teacher’s gender within student and subject, we estimate the effect on student outcomes of changing to a teacher of the same sex. We find no strong support for our initial hypothesis that a same-sex teacher improves student outcomes.