Choosing the Right Parents: Changes in the Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality Between the 1970s and the Early 1990s.

This paper uses the General Social Survey and the comparison between the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Men and of Youth to measure how returns to young men's family background have changed from the late 1970s to the late 1980s and early 1990s. Coming from a wealth family and having a well-educated father who worked in a high-prestige occupation were much more powerfull predictors of a young man's success in the later period. In contrast, maternal education was less important in determining a young man's income and education attainment.