A recent literature studies the role of grandparents in status transmission. Results have been mixed, and theoretical contributions highlight biases that complicate the interpretation of these studies. We use newly harmonized income tax records on more than 700,000 Swedish lineages to establish four empirical facts. First, a model that includes both mothers and fathers and takes a multidimensional view of stratification reduces the residual three-generation association in our population to a trivial size. Second, data on fathers' cognitive ability show that even extensive controls for standard socioeconomic variables fail to remove omitted variable bias. Third, the common finding that grandparents compensate poor parental resources can be attributed to greater difficulty of observing parent status accurately at the lower end of the distribution. Fourth, the lower the data quality, and the less detailed the model, the greater is the size of the estimated grandparent coefficient. Future work on multigenerational mobility should pay less attention to the size and significance of this association, which depends heavily on arbitrary sample and specification characteristics, and go on to establish a set of more robust descriptive facts.

中文翻译：

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全部关于父母：瑞典三代人之间的不平等传播

最近的文献研究了祖父母在身份传递中的作用。结果喜忧参半，理论贡献突出了使这些研究的解释复杂化的偏见。我们使用700,000瑞典血统中新近统一的所得税记录来建立四个经验事实。首先，一个既包含父亲又包含父亲并采用多维分层视图的模型将我们人口中剩余的三代关联减少到很小的规模。其次，有关父亲认知能力的数据表明，即使是对标准社会经济变量的广泛控制也无法消除遗漏的变量偏见。第三，祖父母补偿较差的父母资源的普遍发现可以归因于在分布的较低端准确观察父母身份的难度更大。第四，数据质量越低，模型越详细，估计的祖父母系数的大小就越大。关于多代移动性的未来工作应较少关注这种关联的大小和意义，这种关联在很大程度上取决于任意样本和规范特征，并继续建立一组更可靠的描述性事实。