Family Background and Individual Achievement : Essays in Empirical Labour Economics

Abstract: College choice and subsequent earnings. Results using Swedish sibling data. This paper investigates the relationship between college choice and annual earnings, using within-family variation in college choice. The results show that earnings vary significantly between students who graduated from different types of colleges and the earnings premium is larger for those who graduated at an old university. Do birth order and family size matter for intergenerational income mobility? Evidence from Sweden. Previous studies of intergenerational income mobility have not considered potential birth- order or family-size effects in the estimated income elasticity. This paper estimates the intergenerational income elasticity by birth-order position and family size. The main finding of this paper is that the elasticity tends to decrease with birth order for a given family size, especially for fathers and sons. A comparison of family and neighborhood effects on grades, test scores, educational attainment and income. Evidence from Sweden. This paper compares sibling and neighborhood correlations in school performance, educational attainment and income as a way to learn whether the neighborhood where a child grows up in might explain parts of the sibling similarities found in previous sibling correlation studies. The results show that living in the same neighborhood does not seem to add much to the sibling similarity. What More Than Parental Income? An exploration of what Swedish siblings get from their parents. In this paper, we explore what factors other that parental income can explain why siblings tend to have such similar outcomes as previous correlation studies show. Our results show that parental involvement and attitudes, especially propensity to plan ahead and willingness to postpone benefits to the future, are particularly important for the sibling similarity.