Intergenerational Mobility After Expanding Educational Opportunities: A Quasi Experiment

Francisco Meneses ()
Additional contact information
Francisco Meneses: Duke University

No 586, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: Intergenerational mobility has been linked to both the quality of neighborhoods and the quality of schools and schooling. Understanding the incremental value of investments in either domain is difficult because in many settings, including the U.S., school choices are coupled with neighborhood geography. I take advantage of student access to new subway lines built in Santiago, Chile, to measure the impact of education independent from neighborhood quality using a quasi-experimental design. In Santiago with an established open enrolments school system, the new subway lines substantially reduced transportation costs and increased access to educational opportunities among lower income students. With student level test score data linked with data on parent’s education and demographics, I use a Difference-In-Difference (DID) approach to shows that treated students increased their intergenerational income mobility, with students’ future income ranking increasing on average by 2 percental points above that of their parents, or a 5% of wage increase. Moreover, the paper finds that this is driven by changes in the field of higher education study, not improved test scores or graduation from higher education.

Keywords: Intergenerational mobility; quasi experiment; education; school choice; policy impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 I24 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2021-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2021-586.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2021-586

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).