Social Interaction and Intergenerational Skill Transfer

We explore the relationship between educational attainment and social interaction using individual level data from the British National Child Development Study. To be specific, we analyze whether an intergenerational aspect to this relationship exists by examining the relationship between the educational attainment of children and the degree of formal social activity undertaken by their parents. In accordance with the existing literature, our results support a positive association between education and social interaction. Furthermore, our results suggest that children´s scores in reading, mathematics and vocabulary tests are positively associated with the extent of their parents´ formal social interaction. This relationship is robust to controlling for the degree of intra-family based social interaction and the social activities of the child.