Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring) 1994

Rosenzweig, Mark R., and Kenneth I. Wolpin. 1994. "Are There Increasing Returns to the Intergenerational Production of Human Capital? Maternal Schooling and Child Intellectual Achievement." Journal of Human Resources 29(2):670-694.

Information on ability and achievement test scores of sibling children, many of whom had mothers who continued their schooling between births, is used to test the hypothesis that maternal schooling augments the production of children's human capital, that there are increasing returns to human capital. Estimates from models that take into account heterogeneity in maternal endowments could not reject this hypothesis and suggest benefits to postponed childbearing. In particular, they suggest that postponement of the initiation of childbearing by two years among women who are tenth-graders would result in a 5 percent increase in their children's achievement test scores.

Mark R. Rosenzweig is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Kenneth I. Wolpin is a professor of economics at New York University and a coeditor of the Journal of Human Resources. This research was supported in part by NIH research grant HD 23343. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the December 1991 Donner Foundation Conference on the Economic Well-Being of Women and Children held at the University of Minnesota Industrial Relations Center.