A Test of the Becker-Tomes Model of Human Capital Transmission Using Microdata on Four Generations

We estimate the well-known Becker-Tomes model of intergenerational transmission of human capital. A Swedish data set, which links individual measures on educational attainments of four generations, enables us to use great-grandparents’ education as an instrumental variable. The identifying assumption, which holds within the Becker-Tomes framework, is that great-grandparents’ education is unrelated to great-grandchildren’s education, conditional on the education of the parent and grandparent. We test the model’s prediction that the structural parameter for grandparents’ education enters with a negative sign in an intergenerational regression model.