We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioural problems, grade repetition and obesity. We address endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting with variation in schooling costs when the mother grew up. Using matched data from...

Many literatures investigate the causal impact of income on economic outcomes, for example in the context of intergenerational transmission or well-being and health. Some studies have proposed to use employer wage differentials and in particular industry affiliation as an instrument for income....

This paper provides a new perspective on intergenerational mobility in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We devise an empirical strategy that allows to calculate intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes. The key insight of our approach...

We apply a novel measure of intergenerational mobility (IM) developed by Güell, Rodríguez Mora, and Telmer (2014) to a rich combination of Italian data allowing us to produce comparable measures of IM of income for 103 Italian provinces. We then exploit the large heterogeneity across Italian...

The role of social background for educational choices and outcomes is considered in an overlapping generations setting. It is shown that the impediments for education created by social factors are similar to a market imperfection, and publicly provided education may lead to a Pareto improvement....

Parents with higher education levels have children with higher education levels. Is this because parental education actually changes the outcomes of children, suggesting an important spillover of education policies, or is it merely that more able individuals who have higher education also have...

In this Paper, we analyse the extent to which market forces create an incentive for cloning human beings. We show that a market for cloning arises if a large enough fraction of the clone's income can be appropriated by its model. Only people with the highest ability are cloned, while people at...

We estimate the effect of estate taxation on bequests exploiting a sequence of Italian reforms that culminated with the reduction of estate taxes in 1999 and their abolishment in 2001. To perform our exercise, we use the 1993-2006 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, which has data on real...

The intergenerational elasticity of income is considered one of the best measures of the degree to which a society gives equal opportunity to its members. While much research has been devoted to measuring this reduced-form parameter, less is known about its underlying structural determinants....

A state school system should be expected to reduce income inequality and to make intergenerational mobility easier. It is therefore somewhat surprising to observe that Italy, in comparison to the United States, displays less inequality between occupational incomes, but lower intergenerational...