November 2010

IZA DP No. 5324: Do Parents' Social Skills Influence Their Children's Sociability?

published in: The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, 2014, 14 (3), 1081-1116

This paper examines the effect of parents' social skills on children's sociability, using the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). This survey, like some other national surveys, lacks detailed information on parents; to remedy this deficiency, we construct a measure of parents' "sociability" skills based on their occupational characteristics from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). The sociability relationship varies across parents and children by gender, but remains statistically significant (especially between fathers and sons), even after controlling for a variety of other background characteristics.