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Author: Bjorklund, Anders
Resulting in 5 citations.
1. Bjorklund, Anders
Bratsberg, Bernt
Eriksson, Tor
Jantti, Markus
Naylor, Robin
Raaum, Oddbjorn
Roed, Knut
Osterbacka, Eva
Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the Nordic Countries, the United Kingdom and the United States: An Overview
Working Paper, Abo Akademi University, Abo, Finland, 2005.
Also: http://www.creato.no/espe_2004/sider/pdf/osterbacka.pdf
Cohort(s): Older Men, Young Men
Publisher: European Society for Population Economics (ESPE)
Keyword(s): Britain, British; Cross-national Analysis; Denmark, Danish; Fathers and Children; Fathers and Sons; Finland, Finnish; Gender Differences; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility; Mobility, Economic; Norway, Norwegian; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Also: Presented: Bergen, Norway, European Society for Population Economics, June 2004.

The present paper examines the extent of intergenerational earnings mobility in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and the United States. We examine income mobility among pairs of fathers and sons as well as fathers and daughters using both mobility matrices and regression and correlation coefficients. Our results suggest that while all countries exhibit substantial income persistence across generations, especially in the tails of the distribution, there is greater persistence of rich rather than poor incomes among men, there is less income persistence in the Nordic countries and daughters are more mobile than men.

Bibliography Citation
Bjorklund, Anders, Bernt Bratsberg, Tor Eriksson, Markus Jantti, Robin Naylor, Oddbjorn Raaum, Knut Roed and Eva Osterbacka. "Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the Nordic Countries, the United Kingdom and the United States: An Overview." Working Paper, Abo Akademi University, Abo, Finland, 2005.
2. Bjorklund, Anders
Ginther, Donna K.
Sundstrom, Marianne
Does Marriage Matter for Kids? The Impact of Legal Marriage on Child Outcomes
Presented: Bergen, Norway, XVIII Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics, June 2004.
Also: http://www.creato.no/espe_2004/sider/pdf/Sundstrom_abstr.pdf
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: European Society for Population Economics (ESPE)
Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Children, Academic Development; Children, Behavioral Development; Children, Well-Being; Cohabitation; Family Structure; Marriage; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Sweden, Swedish

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The association between marriage and positive outcomes for children has been documented in numerous studies. For example, McLanahan and Sandefur (1994) show that educational, fertility, and inactivity outcomes for children who grow up with a single-parent or stepparent are far worse than for those children who grow up in an intact family with both (married) biological parents. However, the causal effect of marriage on child outcomes is difficult to identify because marriage is not randomly assigned. Most previous studies of the impact of marriage are plagued by this selection problem. Despite the positive associations between marriage and outcomes, cohabitation is increasing in the U.S. and is ubiquitous in Sweden. In 2000 3.7 percent of household were cohabiting unions in the U.S. Cohabitation in Sweden is more common than anywhere else in the industrialized world, and, although it is more similar to legal marriage than is the case in the U.S., it does not have the same legal implications, e.g. in case of separation or death. Examining the effects of marriage and cohabitation in the U.S: and Sweden allow us to determine whether legal marriage confers benefits to children beyond the similar but less formal ties of cohabitation. This topic is very timely given the Bush Administration's investment of $1.5 billion to promote healthy marriage in the U. S. We address the following research questions: Does legal status of the union matter for children's outcomes? Is it the biological relationship, the quality, or the legal status of their union that confers advantages on children in Sweden and the U.S.? How do children's educational outcomes compare for those residing with cohabiting parents (both biologically related to the children) and those residing with married biological parents and single-parent families in the U.S. and Sweden? How do the results from Sweden inform United States policies that seek to promote healthy marriage?

We use two data sets for the U.S. The first sample is taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the second is the 2000 wave of the NLSY-Child which contains information from 3,425 women with 8,323 children. Combining information from the NLSY79 marital/cohabitating history of their mothers and questions about family structure in the NLSY-Child we create a family structure history. This allow us to distinguish between children living with married biological parents, cohabiting parents, single mothers, mothers married to stepfathers, and mothers cohabiting with unrelated males. We use a number of educational outcomes. For children from ages 5 to 15 we have assessment instruments including three Peabody Individual Achievement Tests (PIAT) for reading and math and the Behavior Problems index which measures a child's anti-social behavior. For children over the ages of 15 we observe school enrollment status and highest grade completed. Explanatory variables include demographic characteristics, parental education, number of siblings, and family income.

For Sweden we use a random sample of children born 1974-84 drawn from the population registers. The data sample roughly 20 percent of Swedish children born each year from 1974-84 and their siblings. The total sample size is over 300,000 child observations. This data is combined with family and individual information from the censuses from 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985 and 1990. Our outcome variables are grade point average at age 16, high school graduation at age 19, and years of schooling and earnings for older children in the sample. We create marital history--length of cohabitation and length of marriage-- for the parents using information from the bidecennial censuses from 1990 and before and tax records after 1990. Our explanatory variables include the sibling composition of the household (his children, her children, and their joint biological children), the educational attainment and earnings of the adults in the household, and whether the family lives in an urban area.

Identifying the causal effect of marriage on outcomes is complicated by the selection problem. We use IV-methods as well as fixed-effect models to deal with this problem.

Bibliography Citation
Bjorklund, Anders, Donna K. Ginther and Marianne Sundstrom. "Does Marriage Matter for Kids? The Impact of Legal Marriage on Child Outcomes." Presented: Bergen, Norway, XVIII Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics, June 2004.
3. Bjorklund, Anders
Ginther, Donna K.
Sundstrom, Marianne
Family Structure and Child Outcomes in the United States and Sweden
IZA Discussion Paper No. 1259, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), August 2004.
Also: http://ssrn.com/abstract=579823
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Keyword(s): Cohabitation; Educational Attainment; Family Structure; Marriage; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID); Siblings; Sweden, Swedish

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

It is well known that children reared in non-intact families on average have less favorable educational outcomes than children reared in two-parent families. Evidence from the United States and Sweden indicates that living in a non-intact family is correlated with lower educational attainment. In this paper we compare the relationships between family structure and children's outcomes in terms of educational attainment and earnings using data from Sweden and the United States. Comparing the United States and Sweden is interesting because both family structure and public policy environments in the two countries differ significantly. Family structure could potentially have a less negative effect in Sweden than in the United States because of the extensive social safety net provided by that country. We find, however, the associations between family structure and children's outcomes to be remarkably similar in the United States and Sweden even though the policy and social environments differ between the two countries; living in a non-intact family is negatively related to child outcomes. This relationship is weakened when we control for other family characteristics, such as time lived with full and half siblings. In addition, when we use sibling difference models to take account of unobserved family characteristics, the relationship is no longer statistically significant. Taken together, our results suggest that the true effect of family structure is more complex than the biological relationship of parents to children in both Sweden and the United States.
Bibliography Citation
Bjorklund, Anders, Donna K. Ginther and Marianne Sundstrom. "Family Structure and Child Outcomes in the United States and Sweden." IZA Discussion Paper No. 1259, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), August 2004.
4. Bjorklund, Anders
Jantti, Markus
Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden Compared to the United States
The American Economic Review 87,5 (December 1997): 1009-1018.
Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2951338
Cohort(s): Older Men, Young Men
Publisher: American Economic Association
Keyword(s): Cross-national Analysis; Family Income; Family Studies; Fathers and Sons; Income; Income Dynamics/Shocks; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility; Mobility, Economic; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID); Sweden, Swedish

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Intergenerational income correlations are an important indication of the extent of economic mobility across families. Until recently it has been thought that the correlations between fathers' and sons' incomes were significantly positive, but quite low, indicating that family background was not a primary deterrent to economic success." Recently, Gary Solon (1989, 1992) and David J. Zimmerman (1992) have reconsidered these findings and considerably improved the methodology and data previously used to measure this correlation. They demonstrated that estimates based on annual income and nonrepresentative homogeneous samples understate the correlation between the long-run economic status of fathers and sons. Using more appropriate techniques and data, they both find correlations between 0.4 and 0.5 for the United States. Because Solon used the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and Zimmerman the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS), the magnitude of their estimates seems fairly reliable. This paper assesses the magnitude of the same parameter for Sweden. Sweden provides an interesting comparison. In terms of equality of outcome, Sweden and the United States are at two extremes among OECD countries-the United States is at the top and Sweden at the bottom of orderings of inequality of disposable income (Anthony B. Atkinson et al., 1995). Their rank order in international comparisons of earnings inequality (before taxes) is similar (Richard Freeman and Lawrence Katz, 1995). Our interest in a comparison of intergenerational income correlation between Sweden and the United States is motivated, in part, by the question whether the extent of crosssectional and intergenerational inequality are independent of each other. Is it possible that Sweden, which has less cross-sectional income inequality, also has more intergenerational mobility?
Bibliography Citation
Bjorklund, Anders and Markus Jantti. "Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden Compared to the United States." The American Economic Review 87,5 (December 1997): 1009-1018.
5. Jantti, Markus
Bratsberg, Bernt
Roed, Knut
Raaum, Oddbjorn
Naylor, Robin
Osterbacka, Eva
Bjorklund, Anders
Eriksson, Tor
American Exceptionalism in a New Light: A Comparison of Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the Nordic Countries, the United Kingdom and the United States
IZA Discussion Paper No. 1938, The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), January 2006.
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Keyword(s): Britain, British; Cross-national Analysis; Denmark, Danish; Educational Attainment; Family Background and Culture; Fathers and Sons; Finland, Finnish; Income Dynamics/Shocks; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility; NCDS - National Child Development Study (British); Norway, Norwegian; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

We develop methods and employ similar sample restrictions to analyze differences in intergenerational earnings mobility across the United States, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. We examine earnings mobility among pairs of fathers and sons as well as fathers and daughters using both mobility matrices and regression and correlation coefficients. Our results suggest that all countries exhibit substantial earnings persistence across generations, but with statistically significant differences across countries. Mobility is lower in the U.S. than in the U.K., where it is lower again compared to the Nordic countries. Persistence is greatest in the tails of the distributions and tends to be particularly high in the upper tails: though in the U.S. this is reversed with a particularly high likelihood that sons of the poorest fathers will remain in the lowest earnings quintile. This is a challenge to the popular notion of "American exceptionalism." The U.S. also differs from the Nordic countries in its very low likelihood that sons of the highest earners will show downward "long-distance" mobility into the lowest earnings quintile. In this, the U.K. is more similar to the U.S.
Bibliography Citation
Jantti, Markus, Bernt Bratsberg, Knut Roed, Oddbjorn Raaum, Robin Naylor, Eva Osterbacka, Anders Bjorklund and Tor Eriksson. "American Exceptionalism in a New Light: A Comparison of Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the Nordic Countries, the United Kingdom and the United States." IZA Discussion Paper No. 1938, The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), January 2006.