educational outcomes. The available evidence on developed countries shows that factors common to siblings explain from 40 to 65 percent of variation in educational outcomes (Bjorklund and Salvanes (2010)). In contrast, intergenerational correlation between parents and children– the traditional measure of intergenerational persistence -- explains from 9 to 21 percent of variations in children‘s educational outcome. An interesting finding from these studies is that gender or geographic location (as measured by neighborhood effect) does not exert any significant influence on the intergenerational persistence in children‘s educational outcomes. Are gender and geography also largely irrelevant for educational mobility faced by children in developing countries? One can argue that the role of gender and geography might be much more prominent in a developing country such as India, because gender bias against women is more common and stronger, geographic mobility is lower, and many areas (especially rural) are not integrated with the urban growth centers because of underdeveloped transport infrastructure.<sup>14</sup> On the other hand, the high tide of rapid economic growth in Indian economy for more than two decades may have lifted all the boats, improving economic mobility across the income distribution, irrespective of gender and geographic location.

The data used in this paper come from the1992/93 and 2006 rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) in India. The first period of our sample nearly overlaps with the period of economic liberalization (1991-1992), and the second period is about 15 years after liberalization. For both survey rounds, our analysis focuses on the same age cohort (16 to 27 year olds) who constitute the bulk of new entrants into the labor force.<sup>15</sup> To examine the spatial aspects in detail, the empirical analysis is done separately for families residing in different areas such as rural vs. urban areas and relatively developed vs. less developed states. To discern any possible gender bias, we implement the empirical analysis separately for male and female samples. We use the mixed effects model to estimate the sibling correlation. An advantage of this approach is that both the family and community level covariates can be included in the analysis to examine their relative influence on sibling correlation (Mazumder (2008), Bjorklund et al. (2011)). We examine the influence of two sets of covariates on sibling and intergenerational correlations: the first set relates to caste and religion of the

> 14 There is evidence that geographic location may be important for economic opportunities faced by households in developing countries. For example, Jalan and Ravallion (1999) show that there are geographic poverty traps in China. Emran and Hou (forthcoming) find that better access to markets increases household consumption in rural China in a significant way. They also find that the effects of domestic market centers are much larger than that of international market access.

> 15 Our conclusions, however, do not depend on this particular age cohorts. In the robustness checks section, we provide evidence using an alternative age cohort sample.

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