Intergenerational educational mobility during the twentieth century

Mobarak Hossain and Martina Beretta

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Intergenerational educational mobility, capturing the extent to which children's education is associated with their parents’ education, has become a major global policy discussion. Studying its long‐term patterns across countries remains difficult, especially in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs), due to limited early twentieth‐century data. Analyzing about 53.7 million observations from 92 countries, using mainly IPUMS census data, we find that recent cohorts exhibit increasing educational mobility across various world regions, with post‐Soviet countries as exceptions. This increase is more prominent for daughters, resulting in a narrowed gender‐based mobility gap in many LMICs, while reversing this pattern in high‐income countries (HICs), with daughters being more mobile in recent decades. Nevertheless, mobility remains higher in HICs than in LMICs. Moreover, we identify a significant association between the expansion of schooling and intergenerational mobility. This expansion is associated with a more substantial rise in intergenerational mobility for daughters, especially in relation to their mothers’ education compared to that of their fathers. Our results demonstrate strong external and internal validity through a series of robustness checks, including data triangulation across multiple sources.

Keywords: intergenerational mobility; education; inequality; twentieth century; global comparison; LMICs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2025-08-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Population and Development Review, 4, August, 2025. ISSN: 0098-7921

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/128832/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:128832

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().