that indicate that parental education explains only 9%-21% of the total variation in children’s years of schooling and lower than the estimates for India, where parental education explains 27%-29% and 31%39% of total the variations in the year of schooling of sons and daughters, respectively (Bjorklund and Salvanes, 2010; Emran and Shilpi, 2011).

Table 3: Intergenerational education elasticity and correlation at regional level

|Region|No of countries|# Observations|ˆ_β_|ˆ_ρ_|Rank|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Asia|9|96,455|0.69|0.39|5|
|Sub-Saharan Africa|9|145,256|0.66|0.51|2|
|Latin America|7|213,768|0.83|0.60|1|
|Eastern bloc|8|21,809|0.38|0.46|3|
|Western Europe and USA|13|34,940|0.52|0.44|4|

_Note:_ Estimates for Sub-Saharan African countries are World Bank calculations. Estimates for other regions are based on pooled data from Hertz et al. (2007). Number of countries refers to the sample counties in each region.

# **5.3 Cohort analysis**

In this section, we investigate the trends in intergenerational mobility in educational attainment of each of the five-year birth cohorts based on the number of years of schooling for both generations. Table 4 reports the results. In line with our previous observations in table 2, parental education has a statistically significant effect on the child’s education across most birth cohorts in all the countries. The intergenerational persistence of education has generally decreased over the last five decades in all the countries, but the trend has not been consistent. In all the countries, there has been a significant improvement in education mobility from the 1960s onward. Nigeria, Guinea, Ghana and Uganda have recorded the highest gains in intergenerational mobility between those born from 1940s to the 1990s. The decline in the relationship between the education of parents and children is quite impressive in Nigeria, where the intergenerational elasticity between the youngest and the oldest cohort declined by 65% between 1942 and 1991 (table 4). For the Comoros, Guinea, and Rwanda, we document a small intergenerational educational persistence rate for the oldest cohorts. However, a lower persistence rate in educational attainment in these countries does not necessarily reflect high social mobility among older cohorts; rather parental education does not vary across households because of the low years of schooling, and parental education can only explain small proportion of the variation in child schooling. For example, children born between 1931 and 1935 in Rwanda have an average 1.4 years of schooling, while their parents have only 0.2 years of schooling. This is consistent with our observations that the explanatory power of the relationship between parental and children’s years of schooling has been limited among older cohorts and increased among the youngest cohorts in these countries (table 4, column 4).

Our sample includes individuals who are continuing their education. This represents either delay in schooling or the pursuit to higher education. If it is caused by delayed completion among children in households with well-educated parents, the intergenerational elasticity will be biased downward. On the other hand, if children in household with less well educated parents are the ones taking more years to complete their education, the covariance between parental education and children’s education increases, and the intergenerational elasticity will be upwardly biased. In light of this, we repeat our analysis by excluding the youngest cohort that is made up of children ages between 20 and 24 from each country where the current enrollment is higher.<sup>8</sup> Our results are relatively unaffected, and the bias is fairly small. In the youngest cohort, the true value of years of schooling is less than 1 year of schooling on average than what we observe in the youngest cohort if we use 20 years as the lower age cutoff.<sup>9</sup>

> 8For the 25 to 29 age-group, the enrollment rate is always less than 7%.

> 9Results are available upon request.

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