This paper examines the transmission of socioeconomic status from one generation to the next. We use intergenerational data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its Child Supplement to estimate the effect of parental family SES (income and education) and other family background...

There is growing concern that improving the academic skills of disadvantaged youth is too difficult and costly, so policymakers should instead focus either on vocationally oriented instruction for teens or else on early childhood education. Yet this conclusion may be premature given that so few...