Suchergebnisse

Veel onderzoekers vinden dat het opleidingsniveau van ouders, en met name van moeders, bepalend is voor het schoolsucces van kinderen. Maar gaat het hierbij om een correlatie of om een aangetoond causaal verband? Is het opleidingssucces van vaders en moeders daadwerkelijk verantwoordelijk voor het opleidingssucces van kinderen? Of zijn het de genen? Als slimme ouders slimme kinderen krijgen die het beter doen op school vanwege slimme genen, kan het zo zijn dat de hoogte van de ouderlijke opleiding geen enkel onafhankelijk effect heeft op de schoolprestaties van kinderen? Erik Plug geeft in zij

When parents are more educated, their children tend to receive more schooling as well. Does this occur because parental ability is passed on genetically or because more educated parents provide a better environment for children to flourish? Using an intergenerational sample of families, we estimate on the basis of a comparison of biological and adopted children that at most 65 percent of the parental ability is genetically transmitted.

One would expect that family income is an important positive factor in the school attainment of children. However, evidence on this relationship is often tainted by the lack of control for parental ability, since at least a portion of ability is transferred genetically to children. This paper considers empirical strategies that control for both observed and unobserved parental ability. In the end, family income still has a significant effect, which must therefore be causative. It implies that high-ability children in low-income families face binding credit constraints that society may wish to relieve.

The applied econometrics of bivariate count data predominantly focus on a bivariate Poisson density with a correlation structure that is very restrictive. The main limitation is that this bivariate distribution excludes zero and negative correlation. This paper introduces a new model which allows for a more flexible correlation structure. To this end the joint density is decomposed by means of the multiplication rule in marginal and conditional densities. Simulation experiments and an application of the model to recreational data are presented.