Intergenerational educational mobility during the twentieth century

Hossain, Mobarak ORCID: 0000-0002-1042-7388 and Beretta, Martina (2025) Intergenerational educational mobility during the twentieth century. Population and Development Review. ISSN 0098-7921 (In Press)

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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 and comparing estimates from different sources.

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Social Policy
Subjects:	L Education > L Education (General) H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions
Date Deposited:	15 Jul 2025 13:12
Last Modified:	15 Jul 2025 13:12
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/128832

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