Volume 37, Number 3 (Summer) 2002
Agnarsson, Sveinn and Paul S. Carlin. 2002. "Family Background and the Estimated Return to Schooling in Earnings Regressions: Swedish Evidence." Journal of Human Resources 37(3): 680-692.
Earnings regressions for married and cohabiting Swedish males in 1993 indicate that controlling for family background reduces the measured return to education by about 9 percent, net of measurement error bias. The Swedish evidence is generally consistent with the hypothesis that family background effects are primarily a result of an efficient marital sorting mechanism, which provides a signal about unobservable traits rather than being an indicator of nepotism.
Sveinn Agnarsson is a fellow of the Institute of Economic Studies at the University of Iceland. Paul S. Carlin, corresponding author, is an associate professor of economics at IUPUI and was a visiting Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Wales Swansea when this research was completed. We thank seminar participants at the University of Gothenburg for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper. The first author thanks Dominique Anxo and Derek Bosworth for comments on an earlier version of the paper. The second author thanks the University of Gothenburg Economics Department for hosting him when this work was begun. Detailed instructions for obtaining the HUS data used in this study can be found at http://cent.hgus.gu.se/econ/econometrics/hus/husin.htm .
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X