Intergenerational Educational Mobility Among Immigrants and Descendants in Denmark: The Role of Sample Selectivity and Data Quality

Rasmus Landersø () and Kristian B. Karlson ()
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Rasmus Landersø: Rockwool Foundation Research Unit
Kristian B. Karlson: University of Copenhagen

No 18284, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper studies intergenerational educational mobility among immigrants and descendants in Denmark for cohorts born between 1965 and 1990. At first glance, the data suggests that immigrants experience higher mobility than native Danes, but this pattern is driven by low coverage and poor data quality of parental education information in administrative registers. Among immigrants with the most reliable data, mobility patterns closely resemble those of natives. Auxiliary analyses using representative survey data corroborate this finding. Moreover, including immigrants in population-wide mobility estimates—given their artificially high relative mobility—attenuates trends in estimated mobility, especially for cohorts bornin the 1980s.

Keywords: native-immigrant gaps; educational mobility; data quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 E52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-ltv
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