最近的研究旨在估计父母的教育与其子女之间的因果关系，但这些研究提供的证据远远不够确凿。本文将探究其中的原因。有很多可能的解释。一是这些研究依赖于不同的数据来源，在不同的时间从不同的国家收集。另一个是这些研究使用了不同的识别策略。目前使用的三种识别策略依赖于:同卵双胞胎;被收养的孤儿;还有工具变量。在本文中，我们将这三种策略分别应用于一个特定的瑞典数据集。目的有三:(i)解释最近文献中不同的证据; (ii) learn more about the quality of each identification procedure; and (iii) get at better perspective about intergenerational effects of education. We find that the three identification strategies all produce intergenerational schooling estimates that are lower than the corresponding OLS estimates, indicating the importance of accounting for ability bias. But interestingly, when applying the three methods to the same data set, we are able to fully replicate the discrepancies across methods found in the previous literature. Our findings therefore indicate that the estimated impact of parental education on that of their child in Sweden does depend on identification, which suggests that country and cohort differences do not lie behind the observed disparities. Finally, we conclude that income is a mechanism linking parent’s and children’s schooling, that can partly explain the diverging results across methods.