The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
What Linear Estimators Miss: The Effects of Family Income on Child Outcomes
Abstract
We assess the implications of nonlinearity for IV and FE estimation when the estimated model is inappropriately assumed to be linear. Our application is the causal link between family income and child outcomes. Our nonlinear IV and FE estimates show an increasing, concave relationship between family income and children's outcomes. We find that the linear estimators miss the significant effects of family income because they assign little weight to the large marginal effects in the lower part of the income distribution. We also show that the linear IV and FE estimates differ primarily because of different weighting of marginal effects. (JEL C26, D14, J12, J13)
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments
Staiger, D., & Stock, J. (1994) · doi:10.3386/t0151 · Cited by 5,302
Identification and estimation of local average treatment effects
Imbens, G. W., & Angrist, J. D. (1994) · Econometrica · doi:10.2307/2951620 · Cited by 4,101
Human Capital and the Rise and Fall of Families
Becker, G. S., & Tomes, N. (1986) · Journal of Labor Economics · doi:10.1086/298118 · Cited by 2,913
An Equilibrium Theory of the Distribution of Income and Intergenerational Mobility
Becker, G. S., & Tomes, N. (1979) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/260831 · Cited by 2,243
The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports
Lochner, L., & Moretti, E. (2004) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/000282804322970751 · Cited by 2,032
Empirical Strategies in Labor Economics
Angrist, J. D., & Krueger, A. B. (1999) · Handbook of Labor Economics · doi:10.1016/s1573-4463(99)03004-7 · Cited by 1,628
Angrist, J. D., & Pischke, J.-S. (2010) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.24.2.3 · Cited by 1,566
Intergenerational Mobility in the Labor Market
Solon, G. (1999) · Handbook of Labor Economics · doi:10.1016/s1573-4463(99)03010-2 · Cited by 1,109
The Impact of Family Income on Child Achievement: Evidence from the Earned Income Tax Credit
Dahl, G. B., & Lochner, L. (2012) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.102.5.1927 · Cited by 832
Estimating Marginal Returns to Education
Carneiro, P., Heckman, J. J., & Vytlacil, E. J. (2011) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.101.6.2754 · Cited by 612
Cited by
The Economics of Human Development and Social Mobility
Heckman, J. J., & Mosso, S. (2014) · Annual Review of Economics · doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-080213-040753 · Cited by 940
Doepke, M., Sorrenti, G., & Zilibotti, F. (2019) · Annual Review of Economics · doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-080218-030156 · Cited by 193
Early and Late Human Capital Investments, Borrowing Constraints, and the Family
Caucutt, E. M., & Lochner, L. (2020) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/704759 · Cited by 191
Flaking Out: Student Absences and Snow Days as Disruptions of Instructional Time
Goodman, J. (2014) · doi:10.3386/w20221 · Cited by 177
Estimating Intergenerational and Assortative Processes in Extended Family Data
Collado, M. D., Ortuño-Ortín, I., & Stuhler, J. (2023) · The Review of Economic Studies · doi:10.1093/restud/rdac060 · Cited by 41
Metadata
- Authors
- Løken, K. V., Mogstad, M., & Wiswall, M.
- Venue
- American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2012-04-01
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 1-35
- ISSN
- 1945-7782 (ISSN-L)
- 1945-7790
- OpenAlex
- W1975703143
- Cited by
- 182
- References
- 10
- FWCI
- 15.28
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: What Linear Estimators Miss: The Effects of Family Income on Child Outcomes. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1257/app.4.2.1
- The paper
- Løken, K. V., Mogstad, M., & Wiswall, M. (2012). What Linear Estimators Miss: The Effects of Family Income on Child Outcomes. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.4.2.1
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.