Parents’ income and wealth matter more for children with low than high academic performance: Evidence from comparisons between and within families in egalitarian Norway

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2022.100692Get rights and content
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Abstract

Most educational mobility research assumes that the associations between parents' economic resources and children's academic performance do not vary between low- and high-performing children. Analyzing such variation increases our understanding of how family background affects children's life chances. We examine the egalitarian case of Norway, where we should expect smaller differences than in other countries. We use quantile regression models to estimate variation in the impact of parental income and wealth on children's school grades across the distribution of school grades. We compare the within-family effects of parental income and wealth on children's educational performance with the associations between families. We apply this approach to Norwegian register data, which includes information on children's school grades at age 16. For both parental income and wealth, we find a declining association with children's school grades across the distribution of school grades. This pattern is found in both between- and within-family analyses. These findings are in line with the view that parents compensate for children's low academic performance.

Keywords

Education
Income
Intergenerational mobility
Quantile regression
Wealth

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Øyvind Nicolay Wiborg is a professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo (UiO). His academic interests focus on social stratification, educational and occupational mobility, as well as income and wealth mobility. Wiborg has published several articles within these fields of research.

Michael Grätz is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Lausanne, where he conducts a research project financed via an Ambizione grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is also an associate professor at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University. His research interests are in the fields of child development, social stratification, and social demography. Recent publications have appeared in, among others, Demography, European Sociological Review, Sociological Science, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.