Essays on Educational Choice and Intergenerational Mobility

Abstract: This thesis consists of four self-contained essays. The first essay concerns educational choice and the returns to college in Sweden. I apply a recently introduced econometric framework that allows for self selection and treatment effect heterogeneity. I also examine the influence of cognitive and noncognitive ability on college choice and the returns to college.Essays two through four concern different aspects of intergenerational income mobility. In the second essay, we study the impact on mobility estimates from heterogeneous income profiles and, more specifically, life-cycle bias. We use nearly career-long income measures for both fathers and sons to give a detailed account of this bias and assess recent methods to deal with it.In the third essay, we present a simple model of intergenerational transmission and use it to analyze the dynamic behavior of the intergenerational income elasticity following structural changes. We find that past structural frameworks, for example in the form of past policies or institutions, matter for current trends in mobility.The fourth essay provides a cross-country perspective on intergenerational income mobility. We construct comparable data sets for Sweden and the UK and account for country differences in the role of parental income for various productivity traits of children. Finally, we examine whether such differences can explain the country difference in intergenerational income mobility.