Social capital endowment's role in the intergenerational transmission of education

This paper aims at disentangling the effect of parents’ fertility and education on children’s educational outcomes by means of social capital endowment. We use parents’ social capital endowment as exogenous factor predicting parents’ education and fertility, and children’s social capital values. We apply an ordered Probit to estimate children’s probability to acquire a certain educational level, using the predicted instrumental variables. We use a sample of respondents aged 18-60 years old from the cross-sectional Bank of Italy's Survey on Household's Income and Wealth (SHIW) 2010. We found that parents’ social capital endowment is a good predictor of parents’ education, fertility, and children’s own social capital. All these aspects affect differently the probability of a child to acquire a tertiary degree.