The Impact of Parental Education on Childrens Future Income

Abstract: This study examines the casual effect of parental educational achievement and family background on educational outcome and income for children. In addition, the study tests the parental education as an instrumental variable for childrens education. The 2022 United States General Social Survey (GSS2022) has been used as the dataset. This article uses Mincer earning function and instrumental variable regression to generate the outcomes between parental status, parental educational achievement, and the outcomes for children. The result indicates that the impact of parental educational achievement and advantage family background on income for children is negligible. The result also shows that the education has a significant effect on income. Furthermore, the study finds out that there is significant correlation between parental educational achievement and the educational achievement for children. In addition, the advantage family background has a significant impact on educational attainment for children. Moreover, the instrumental variable regression outcomes indicate that the difference between IV regression and OLS regression is small. This research uses the latest dataset to find out the casual effects of family background and parental education on childrens education and future income.