Sibling wealth corelations

A large literature has studied social mobility between generations. Many of these studies estimate correlations between siblings, which provide a measure of how important family background and shared childhood environment are for adult outcomes such as income or education. This method has very rarely been used to study the formation of wealth.

The transfer of wealth from parents to children is important because it tells us something about how inequality is transmitted between generations. Furthermore, previous research has indicated that the transmission of wealth partly works through other channels than the transmission of human capital.

In this project, we use Swedish administrative data to estimate sibling correlations in wealth, in order to determine the influence of shared background and study which mechanisms drive the intergenerational transmission. We study the importance of inheritance as well as more indirect channels such as parental earnings and education. We also map the evolution of sibling correlations over time.