Researchers Hans K. Hvide and Paul Oyer published a fantastic National Bureau of Economic Research study, Dinner Table Human Capital and Entrepreneurship. Hvide and Oyer examine a sample of Norwegian entrepreneurs to compare “dinner table human capital (parental labor market experience) and aptitude (IQ) to entrepreneurial entry, sector choice, and startup performance.”

The authors conclude,

A majority of entrepreneurs start a firm in the same or a closely related industry as their fathers’ industry of employment. This tendency is correlated with intelligence: higher-IQ entrepreneurs are less likely to follow their fathers. Third, we showed that businesses started by people who follow the industry in which their fathers worked are noticeably more successful after four years of operation by several different measures. We interpret this as suggesting that dinner table human capital is quite valuable and that many parents give their children a valuable gift of industry knowledge, a conclusion that is supported by analysis of the subset of entrepreneurs where the father is dead upon starting up the firm, by our survey evidence, and by the analysis of data for all workers in Norway. (Emphasis added.)

Interestingly. the authors found that “those with more general human capital gained from the education system are less likely to follow their parents.”  In other words, “dinner table knowledge” leads to more success than “classroom knowledge.”