# Growing Up Together: Sibling Correlation, Parental Inuence, and Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Developing Countries

Md. Nazmul Ahsan, St. Louis University<sup>1</sup> M. Shahe Emran, IPD at Columbia University Hanchen Jiang, University of North Texas Qingyang Han, Johns Hopkins University Forhad Shilpi, DECRG, World Bank First Drat: June 22, 2022; This Version: January 16, 2023 ABSTRACT This paper presents credible and comparable evidence on intergenerational educational mobility in 53 developing countries using sibling correlation as a measure, and data from 230 waves of Demographic and Health Surveys. It is the rst paper to provide estimates of sibling correlation in schooling for a large number of developing countries using high quality standardized data. Sibling correlation is an omnibus measure of mobility as it captures observed and unobserved family and neighborhood factors shared by siblings when growing up together. The estimates suggest that sibling correlation in schooling in developing countries is much higher (average 0.59) than that in developed countries (average 0.41). There is substantial spatial heterogeneity across regions, with Latin America and Caribbean having the highest (0.65) and Europe and Central Asia the lowest (0.48) estimates. Country level heterogeneity within a region is more pronounced. The evolution of sibling correlation suggests a variety of mobility experiences, with some regions registering a monotonically declining trend from the 1970s birth cohort to the 1990s birth cohort (Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and Pacic), while others remained trapped in stagnancy (South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa). The only region that experienced monotonically increasing sibling correlation is the Middle East and North Africa. The recent approach of Bingley and Cappellari (2019) is used to estimate the share of sibling correlation due to intergenerational transmission. The estimates show that when the homogeneity and independence assumptions implicit in the standard model of intergenerational transmission are relaxed, the estimated share is much larger. In the sample of countries, on average 74 percent of sibling correlation can be attributed to intergenerational transmission, while there are some countries where the share is more than 80 percent (most in Sub-Saharan Africa). This suggests a dominant role for parents in determining the educational opportunities of their children. Evidence on the evolution of the intergenerational share, however, suggests a declining importance of the intergenerational transmission component in many countries, but the pattern is diverse. In some cases, the trend in the intergenerational share is opposite to the trend in sibling correlation.

JEL Codes: J0, D3, J62 Key Words: Sibling Correlation, Intergenerational Mobility, Education, Years of Schooling, Developing Countries, Intergenerational Share, Decomposition, DHS

> 1Emails for correspondence: shahe.emran.econ@gmail.com. (M. Shahe Emran); fshilpi@worldbank.org (Forhad Shilpi). We would like to thank Lorenzo Cappellari for helpful discussion on econometric issues, and Ira Gang, Kunal Sen, Lewis Anderson and participants at a seminar at University of Windsor for useful comments on an earlier version.