Grand Advantage: Family Wealth and Grandchildren’s Educational Achievement in Sweden
Open accessAbstract
We study the role of family wealth for children’s educational achievement using novel Swedish register data. In particular, we focus on the relationship between grandparents’ wealth and their grandchildren’s educational achievement. Doing so allows us to reliably establish the independent role of wealth in contributing to long-term inequalities in opportunity. We use regression models with extensive controls to account for observed socioeconomic characteristics of families, cousin fixed effects to net out potentially unobserved grandparent effects, and marginal structural models to account for endogenous selection. We find substantial associations between grandparents’ wealth and their grandchildren’s grade point averages (GPA) in the 9th grade that are only partly mediated by parents’ socioeconomic characteristics and wealth. Our findings indicate that family wealth inequality—even in a comparatively egalitarian context like Sweden—has profound consequences for the distribution of opportunity across multiple generations. We posit that our estimates of the long-term consequences of wealth inequality may be conservative for nations other than Sweden, like the United States, where family wealth—in addition to its insurance and normative functions—allows the direct purchase of educational quality and access.
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A direct effect of grandparents on their grandchildren is possible through means that do not require contact, such as financial transfers.
“However, there are exceptions (Zeng and Xie 2014), and a direct effect of grandparents on their grandchildren is possible through means that do not require contact, such as financial transfers (Hällsten and Pfeffer 2017).”
From Educational Inequality* (2022) · cites this paper as Hällsten and Pfeffer 2017
The Discussion reports a direct association between grandparental wealth and grandchildren’s educational achievement beyond parent-mediated transmission. The Theoretical Background mentions direct transfers, but our copy does not establish financial transfers as the mechanism for that association or address whether it requires contact. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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“Conceptualizing family more broadly, the wealth of grandparents is associated with own educational attainment and wealth, net of parental wealth (Hällsten & Pfeffer 2017, Pfeffer & Killewald 2015), and extended family wealth is associated with education, transition to homeownership, and own wealth…”
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- Authors
- Hällsten, M., & Pfeffer, F. T.
- Affiliations
- Stockholm University (SE)
- University of Michigan (US)
- Corresponding author
- Hällsten, Martin
- Venue
- American Sociological Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2017-03-07
- Volume
- 82
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 328-360
- ISSN
- 0003-1224 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-8271
- PMC
- PMC5703428
- OpenAlex
- W2593160432
- Cited by
- 187
- References
- 82
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 23 · 2019: 14 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 1 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 39.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- American Sociological Review (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Econstor (Econstor) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Institutet för arbetsmarknads- och utbildningspolitisk politisk utvärdering
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24HD041028, P2CHD041028)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies
- Social Sciences › Education › School Choice and Performance
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Cultural Dynamics
- Keywords
- family wealth, academic performance, intergenerational transmission, grandchildren, educational inequality, socioeconomic disparities, grade point average, marginal structural models, endogenous selection, Sweden
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