The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

In this paper, I estimate intergenerational mobility (IGM) in education using crosssectional data from 91 censuses that span 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) over half a century. I measure upward mobility as the likelihood of obtaining at least a primary education for individuals whose parents did not finish primary school, whereas downward mobility as the likelihood of failing to complete primary education for individuals whose parents completed at least primary school. In addition, I explore the geography of educational IGM using nearly 400 "provinces" (coarse administrative units similar to states in the U.S.) and more than 6,000 "districts" (fine administrative units similar to counties in the U.S.). I document wide cross-country and within-country heterogeneity. In LAC, the distance between the most and least upwardly mobile country is close to what has been recently documented in Africa, although the least mobile countries in Africa are less mobile than the least mobile in LAC. I document a declining trend in the mobility gap between urban and rural populations, but I do not find important differences by gender. Within countries, the level of mobility is highly correlated to the share of primary completion of the previous generation, which suggests a high level of inertia. In addition, upward (downward) mobility is negatively (positively) correlated to distance to the capital and the share of employment in agriculture, but positively (negatively) correlated to the share of employment in industry.

When Measure Matters: Coresidence Bias and Intergenerational Mobility Revisited

“…For example, Papaioannou (2020, 2021); Asher, Novosad, and Rafkin (2021); Card, Domnisoru, and Taylor (2022); Dodin, Findeisen, Henkel, Sachs, and Schüle (2021); Munoz (2021a); Van der Weide, Ferreira de Souza, and Barbosa (2020) focus on a sub-national level. Second, several studies seek to build indicators that allow comparisons across countries and/or regions (see for example, Alesina et al, 2020;Munoz, 2021a). An important implication is that different samples must be comparable, and the ranking that results from pooling the indicators from all these sources must be meaningful.…”

Education Inequalities in Latin America and the Caribbean

“…For example, a number of empirical studies have analyzed the association between human capital accumulation and income inequality(Blundell, 2022;Coady & Dizioli, 2018;Gasparini & Cruces, 2021).3 In developed countries, an extensive literature have analyzed how the intergenerational income transmission is associated with educational outcomes(Rothstein, 2019;Handy & Shester, 2022;von Stumm, Cave, & Wakeling, 2022), and for the Latin American region the literature has focused on the intergenerational mobility in education(Neidhöfer, Ciaschi, & Gasparini, 2021;Munoz, 2021;De La Mata, et al, 2022), or the association between income and education inequality(Trucco, 2014;UNDP, 2021;Busso & Messina, 2020).…”