boys in terms of absolute mobility in the developing world in the coming decade(s). In the highincome world girls have already overtaken boys on average in terms of absolute mobility. We do not observe notable gender gaps in relative mobility.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes our methodology and presents our measures of intergenerational mobility. Section 3 describes the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility. Section 4 presents the trends and patterns in intergenerational mobility over time, across the world, and by gender. Section 5 analyzes correlates with intergenerational mobility. Section 6 presents robustness checks while Section 7 concludes.

# **2. Intergenerational mobility in education**

Intergenerational mobility is interpreted here in two distinct but related ways, which we will refer to as absolute mobility and relative mobility. What we term absolute versus relative mobility may differ slightly from how these terms are used in other studies, in part because this terminology has been used loosely (for a recent review of different measures see Jäntti and Jenkins (2015) and Fields and Ok (1996, 1999)). Table 1 summarizes the measures of absolute and relative mobility used in this paper, which will be explained in more detail in this section.

The estimation of intergenerational mobility between parents and children requires specifying which parents and children one is referring to. Unless otherwise specified, all children are considered in the estimation of mobility. Whenever parental education is referred to, the maximum education attained by the parents is used.<sup>4</sup> Our motivation for using maximum parental education is three-fold. Firstly, it provides a more accurate measure of the parental human capital that can be transferred to the parents’ children. Secondly, it arguably provides a more accurate proxy of the household resources that can be invested in the human capital growth of the children. Thirdly, maximum parental education is probably a more stable measure to the extent that it is more robust to the expansion of female educational attainment and the increasing correlation of educational attainments between parents (i.e. assortative mating). Using maximum parental education produces lower levels of absolute mobility such that our approach may yield conservative estimates.<sup>5</sup>

> 4 Estimates using fathers and mothers separately, as well as estimates based on parents’ average years of schooling are available in the online version of the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility. For three countries, information on fathers’ years of schooling but not on mothers’ years of schooling is available (Benin, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Chad). In these cases, it is assumed that the maximum value of parental years of schooling is equivalent to the father’s years of schooling.

> 5 The existing literature of earnings mobility tends to focus on father-son mobility in large part because of the low levels of female labor force participation observed during the periods when this literature originated, and to avoid the associated selection bias. Since then female employment has increased substantially, which has weakened the

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