Intergenerational Mobility in Socio-emotional Skills
This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of socio-emotional skills during childhood, using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) in the United Kingdom. This dataset enables us to measure two dimensions of socio-emotional development: internalising and externalising skills. More importantly, we can use multiple measures of parents’ skills collected during both their childhood and their adulthood. Whereas parent-child skills are strongly related when both are measured contemporaneously, they remain correlated when both are measured in childhood, with a stronger transmission observed from mothers to their children. Additionally, by leveraging the BCS70 data on socio-emotional skills for three generations, we estimate multi-generational persistence. Notably, we find a correlation between the grandmother’s internalising skill and the grandchildren’s skills, even after accounting for parental skills.
More from NBER
In addition to working papers, the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter, the NBER Digest, the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability, the Bulletin on Health, and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship — as well as online conference reports, video lectures, and interviews.
