Parents & Income
The graph below is from a fascinating new paper, “What Happens When We Randomly Assign Children to Families?,” by Bruce Sacerdote. Holt’s International Children’s Services places children, primarily Koreans, with families in the United States. Children are randomly assigned. Sacerdote has collected data from children who were adopted between 1970-1980, and thus who today are in their mid-20s or -30s, and their adoptive parents.
The graph shows how parent income at the time of adoption relates to child income for the adopted and “biological” (non-adopted) children. The income of biological children increases strongly with parental income but the income of adoptive children does not.
The graph does not say that adopted children necessarily have low income; some have high and some have low income and the same is true of biological children. What the graph says is that higher parental income predicts higher child income but only for biological children and not for adoptees.