The 'success gap' for children of older parents is likely a statistical mirage.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
Age of Parent or Timing of Birth? Addressing the Challenge of Identifying and Interpreting Parental-Age Effects in Studies of Child Outcomes
SocArXiv · r9fg8_v3
The Takeaway
Common wisdom suggests children of older parents do better because their parents are more established. This paper reveals that when you disentangle the year a child was born from the parent's age, the 'age advantage' mostly disappears, suggesting kids are just benefiting from general societal progress over time.
From the abstract
Do children of older parents do better because their parents are older, or because they are born into "better times"? I argue that this question is challenging to answer empirically because it poses an age-period-cohort-type identification problem. Once parental birth year is treated as a relevant confounder—either explicitly or implicitly, as in sibling-comparison and family fixed-effects designs—parental age at birth and child birth year become perfectly collinear. I address this problem by ad