Volume 26, Number 3 (Summer) 1991
Solon, Gary, Mary Corcoran, Roger Gordon, and Deborah Laren. 1991. "A Longitudinal Analysis of Sibling Correlations in Economic Status." Journal of Human Resources 26(3):509-534.
Numerous previous studies have used sibling correlations to measure the importance of family background as a determinant of economic status. The sibling correlations estimated in these studies, however, have been depressed by a failure to distinguish transitory and permanent income variation and, in some cases, by overly homogeneous samples. This paper presents a methodology to address these problems and applies it to longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our main conclusion is that family background exerts greater influence on economic status than has been indicated by most earlier research.
All four authors are at the University of Michigan. Solon is an associate professor of economics and public policy, Corcoran is a professor of political science, public policy, and social work, Gordon is a professor of economics, and Laren is a research associate at the Institute fro Social Research. This research was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation to the Institute of Public Policy Studies at the University of Michigan and by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship awarded to Solon. The authors are grateful for advice from John Bound, Charles Brown, Leslie Kish, James Lepkowski, the referees, and seminar participants at Harvard, Northwestern, and Princeton Universities and the Universities of Michigan, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Toronto, and Western Ontario.
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US ISSN 0022-166X