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How Large Are the Effects from Changes in Family Environment? A Study of Korean American Adoptees

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  • Bruce Sacerdote

Abstract

I analyze a new set of data on Korean American adoptees who were quasirandomly assigned to adoptive families. I find large effects on adoptees' education, income, and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families. Parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics. Outcomes such as drinking, smoking, and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment. Using the standard behavioral genetics variance decomposition, I find that shared family environment explains 14 percent of the variation in educational attainment, 35 percent of the variation in college selectivity, and 33 percent of the variation in drinking behavior. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Bibliographic Info

Article provided by MIT Press in its journal The Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Volume (Year): 122 (2007)
Issue (Month): 1 (02)
Pages: 119-157
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Handle: RePEc:tpr:qjecon:v:122:y:2007:i:1:p:119-157

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Cited by:
  1. Patricia M. Anderson & Kristin F. Butcher & Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, 2007. "Childhood Disadvantage and Obesity: Is Nurture Trumping Nature?," NBER Working Papers 13479, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. Paul Gregg & Carol Propper & Elizabeth Washbrook, 2007. "Understanding the relationship between parental income and multiple child outcomes: A decomposition analysis," CASE Papers case129, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
  3. Michael M. Pichler, 2010. "The Economics of Cultural Formation of Preferences," Working Papers 431, Bielefeld University, Institute of Mathematical Economics.
  4. Washington, Ebonya, 2007. "Female Socialization How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers' Voting on Women's Issues," Working Papers 15, Yale University, Department of Economics.
  5. Ran Abramitzky & Leah Platt Boustan & Katherine Eriksson, 2010. "Europe's tired, poor, huddled masses: Self-selection and economic outcomes in the age of mass migration," NBER Working Papers 15684, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  6. David, Cesarini & Dawes, Christopher T. & Johannesson, Magnus & Lichtenstein, Paul & Wallace, Björn, 2007. "Genetic Variation in Preferences for Giving and Risk-Taking," Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 679, Stockholm School of Economics, revised 12 Jan 2009.

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