alt Hacker News"examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence."
Quite an interesting article. I sort of agree with its conclusions, but I don't think the methodology actually works. They are measuring something, but that thing isn't an isolated measure of nepotism.
I suspect it's mire a measure of inflow, of new blood.
Those phenomenon are not distinct. There is no hard line between occupational persistence, nepotism and human capital inheritance.
In particular (from a very quick glance!) it looks like they distinguish between nepotism and inherited human capital only by using a particular model. They have data on father-son pairs and the correlation between them in terms of publication record; and data on total number of publications of (a) academics' sons and (b) outsiders. They impose a model with just nepotism and inherited human capital and fit it to the data. I'd worry there might be other explanations for the observed patterns.