household which are identified as important determinants of educational attainment in India, and the second relates to the geographic location as measured by neighborhood fixed effect.<sup>16</sup> Our estimates of sibling and intergenerational correlations suggest no significant change in the intergenerational persistence in educational attainment for a large proportion of the population in India from 1992/93 to 2006. Sibling (and intergenerational) correlations in our full sample have declined only marginally from 0.64 (0.57) in 1992/93 to 0.62 (0.54) in 2006 respectively.<sup>17</sup> However, this aggregate picture hides important gender and spatial differences. While the evidence indicates that the sibling correlation among men (brothers) has remained effectively unchanged (it increased slightly from 0.614 in 1993 to 0.624 in 2006), it experienced a moderate decline for women, (sisters) from 0.780 to 0.696. Geographic location is important, both in 1992/93 and 2006; the neighborhood effect accounts for about 40 percent of the sibling correlation among women and a third among men. In terms of geographic pattern, we find that sibling correlation remained essentially unchanged in rural areas and declined marginally in urban areas. The sibling correlation also declined slightly in the developed states, but increased in the less-developed states. Perhaps the most interesting trends and patterns emerge when we partition the data using both gender and geography. The sibling correlations among men (brothers) in rural areas and less-developed states have increased a bit, but the correlation has in fact declined marginally in urban areas and remained virtually constant in developed states. In contrast, the sibling correlations among women (sisters) registered a decline irrespective of geographic partitioning of the data. However, geography matters for women also, only the women in urban areas and developed states experienced substantial decline in sibling correlations. As a result, the gender gap in sibling correlation has disappeared in urban areas though it remains virtually unchanged in rural areas. We also find that among the urban women, it is the lower caste women who experienced the largest decline in the sibling correlation. The evidence on improvements in educational mobility of women is similar to the available evidence on China and Malaysia (see Emran and Sun (2011) on China and Lillard and Willis (1994) on

> 16 The recent evidence using NSS data shows that the influence of caste and religious identity on the strength of intergenerational link between parents and children has become much weaker (Hnatkovska et al. (2011)). Our results also show a similar pattern. It is however, important to note that the direct effect of lower caste and Muslim dummy remains significantly negative on children‘s educational attainment.

> 17 Note that a formal test of equality of the estimates in 1993 and 2006 rejects the null because of very small standard errors due to the large sample sizes (number of observations is 34000 in 1993 and 38000 in 2006). However, statistical precision is largely irrelevant here, because the difference in the numerical magnitude of the estimates between 1992/93 and 2006 is very small in most of the cases, suggesting the lack of any substantial change in intergenerational mobility over a period of almost a decade and a half of impressive economic growth.

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