We evaluate the association between foster care placement during childhood and adult criminality. In contrast to previous studies, we allow associations to vary by gender and age at initial placement. We find that foster care predicts higher adult criminality for males first placed during...

We explore the origins of the intergenerational association in entrepreneurship using Swedish adoption data that allow us to quantify the relative importance of prebirth and postbirth factors. We find that parental entrepreneurship increases the probability of children’s entrepreneurship by...

We use new estimators of directional rank mobility developed by Bhattacharya and Mazumder (2011) to compare rates of upward and downward intergenerational mobility across three countries: Canada, Sweden and the United States. These measures overcome some of the limitations of traditional...

We investigate if the association between family background and income in Sweden has changed for men born between 1932 and 1968. Our main finding is that the share of the variance in long-run income that is attributable to family background, the so-called brother correlation in income, has...

When capital-skill complementarity is present in the production process, changes in the skill premium are driven not only by changes in the ratio of unskilled- to skilled labor inputs (as they are in the case with Cobb-Douglas production), but also by changes in the capital-skill ratio. A simple...

Sons (daughters) with criminal fathers have 2.06 (2.66) times higher odds of having a criminal conviction than those with noncriminal fathers. One additional paternal sentence increases sons’ (daughters’) convictions by 32 (53) percent. Compared to traditional labor market measures, the...

We use Swedish adoption data combined with police register data to study parent–son associations in crime. For adopted sons born in Sweden, we have access to the criminal records of both the adopting and biological parents. This allows us to assess the relative importance of pre-birth factors...

We construct a simple model, consistent with Becker and Tomes, that decomposes the intergenerational income elasticity into the causal effect of financial resources, the mechanistic transmission of human capital, and the role that human capital plays in the determination of fathers’ permanent...