Schooling Mobility across Three Generations in Six Latin American Countries

Pablo Celhay () and Sebastian Gallegos
Additional contact information
Pablo Celhay: Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

No 17072, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper presents new evidence on schooling mobility across three generations in six Latin American countries. By combining survey information with national census data, we have constructed a novel dataset that includes 50,000 triads of grandparents, parents, and children born between 1890 and 1990. We estimate five intergenerational mobility (IGM) measures, finding that (i) the empirical multigenerational persistence in our six countries is twice as high as in developed countries, and 77% higher than what the theoretical model by Becker & Tomes (1986) predicts; (ii) Clark's (2014) theory of high and sticky persistence provides a better approximation for describing mobility across multiple generations in our sample; (iii) Even with high persistence, we uncover significant mobility improvements at the bottom of the distribution by estimating measures of absolute upward mobility (Chetty et al., 2014) and bottom-half mobility (Asher et al., 2022) over three generations. This novel evidence deepens our understanding of long-term mobility, and we expect future research to replicate it as more multigenerational data becomes available in different contexts.

Keywords: educational policy; intergenerational mobility; Latin America; developing countries; multiple generations; compulsory schooling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I25 I28 J62 N36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 86 pages
Date: 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-his, nep-lam, nep-ltv and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Journal of Population Economics, 2025, 38, 23 (2025)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17072.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Schooling mobility across three generations in six Latin American countries (2025)
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:iza:izadps:dp17072

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().