From Parent to Child

How do parents allocate human capital among their children? To what extent do parental decisions about resource allocation determine children's eventual economic success? The analyses in this text explore these questions by developing and testing a model in which the earnings of children with different genetic endowments respond differently to investments in human capital. Behrman, Pollak and Taubman use this model to investigate issues such as: parental bias in resource allocations based on gender or birth order; the extent of intergenerational mobility in income, earnings and schooling in the United States; the relative importance of environmental and genetic factors in determining variations in schooling; and whether parents' distributions offset the intended effects of government programmes designed to subsidize children. In allocating scarce resources, parents face a trade-off between equity and efficiency, between the competing desires to equalize the wealth of their children and to maximize the sum of their earnings.